The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

An Overgrowth of Democracy

Spring is late coming to the Midwest this year, but democracy is blooming in Illinois. Most of the state is to hold township elections on April 9 to elect some of the most redundant and least useful public officials in American politics.

Personally, I could do with more tulips and fewer townships.

Leveraging Philanthropy for the Economy

There's a new community foundation in St. Joseph, Missouri, that is trying something really new -- to marshal the funds it oversees to promote economic development in St. Joseph and the northwestern Missouri region that neighbors it.

A community foundation exists to house personal or family foundations in its area. Most wealthy families can't set up vast billion-dollar foundations, lavishly staffed, like the Fords or MacArthurs. So they set up smaller foundations and park them inside community foundations, which handle the paperwork and see that the funds are spent as the founding families direct.

This money can go to scholarships, or to an arboretum, or to the care and feeding of cats. The Community Foundation of Northwest Missouri will accommodate these directives, if asked. But one of its goals is to educate the region, including its philanthropists, on the importance of repairing the region's tired old economy, generating a new economy and reviving the area as an economically decent place to live.

So far as I know, no other community foundation in the country --and there are more than 700 of them -- has set itself this goal.

Saving the Countryside

A Midwestern public radio reporter phoned the other day with a really good question. Why do small towns and rural areas matter? she asked. Everybody talks about scarce federal and state resources. So are small towns and rural areas important enough to our future to be worth investing in?

She referred to a recent speech by Tom Vilsack, the agricuture secretary, who said that "it's a fact that rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we had better recognize that and we better begin to reverse it."

Pop Goes the Bubble

Yogi Berra has reminded us that "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." With all respect for the Sage of St. Louis, I'm going to make a prediction that is sure to pan out. Here it is:

There is a big and growing bubble in farm land prices across the Midwest, and this bubble will pop, sooner or later. The result will be a rash of failed farms and rural misery.

We know this will happen because it's happened before, most recently thirty years ago. In the 1970s, a variety of factors -- mostly high grain prices -- sent farm land prices to record heights as farmers borrowed heavily to buy as much land as they could. Then, in the early 1980s, other factors -- mostly falling grain prices -- left many indebted farmers unable to pay their debts.

The result: thousands of Midwestern farms failed. Banks foreclosed. Many small rural banks, holding too many bad loans, also failed. Newspapers reported farmer suicides, even the murder of bankers by distraught farmers. Farm foreclosure sales became common social events. Most big farmers weathered the storm, but medium-sized farmers, whose debt soared by 250 percent in the 1970s, collapsed. Usually, they were bought by bigger farmers next door, accelerating the consolidation of Midwestern farming and the decline in rural population.

A Lifeline from the World

As the global economy concentrates in cities, it has left behind a hinterland -- too often a wasteland -- of old factory cities and rural towns literally cut off from the global conversation.

It's easy --and wrong -- to say that the people in these towns are globalization's leftovers, men and women who can't cut it in this new economy, refugees happily hiding from the rest of the world, with no interest in that world and nothing to say about it. Many do indeed feel like castaways, but they long for more links with a world that has passed them by.

Icarus on the Farm

All farmers keep a constant eye on the horizon, watching for the cloud that might bring rain to nourish the crops or hail to destroy them. As the new year dawned, the most ominous financial cloud in a generation appeared on the horizon of the rural Midwest. Even farmers too young to remember the last big storm would be wise to get their financial crib doors shut before the next one hits.

It seems cruel to sound this warning just now. At the moment, farming is the one prosperous part of the American economy. Farmers are getting prices which, if not records, are very high. Corn is rising again, to about $6.50 a bushel. Soybeans are also up, to about $12 a bushel. The price of farm land has never been higher. The average price of an Iowa acre shot up no less than 32 percent last year, to $6,700: Illinois and Indiana aren't far behind. Sales of $10,000 per acre or more are common.

The real estate market may be dead everywhere else, but not down on the farm. In a recession-weary nation, it's great to be a Midwestern farmer. 

So what's the problem? What's the cloud that threatens to rain on the rural picnic?

Drifting in the Driftless Area

I spent the last week in Galena, a gem of an old Victorian town, nestled in the hills and forests of the so-called Driftless Area, in northeast Illinois near the Mississippi River Valley. I came away thinking how this area could be more than the beautiful but generally depressed region it is now.

Galena itself seems to be doing fine. It is a tourism and second-home mecca, packed with good restaurants and refugees from Chicago. But the Driftless Area itself is divided between four states and some 25 to 35 counties, depending on where you draw the boundaries. None of these jurisdictions -- not the states nor the counties -- has been able to work with the others to leverage the region's scenic potential and combat the economic distress that, like the scenery, they all share.

Thinking About the Future

It's easy to get that neglected feeling, sitting here in the Midwest, surveying the industrial collapse in our own back yard and wondering if anybody out there really cares. The pre-dawn dustup in Zuccotti Park gets more national air time and ink than the destruction of Midwestern towns and cities, even though the same pathology -- an economy out of control -- underlies both. As Willy Loman's wife said in The Death of a Salesman, "attention must be paid."

That may be changing. In the past few days, at least two nationwide broadcasts have looked at the plight of old industrial cities in the Midwest. Both recognized the economic problems but emphasized positive measures to remedy them.

The Midwest Is Going Regional

Everyone who's studied the Midwestern economy agrees that strictly local solutions don't work, and it's time to work regionally. Everyone also agrees that Midwesterners are just too ornery by nature to accept the cooperation that regionalism requires. 

It's beginning to look as though everyone is only half right. Regional arrangements are sprouting like corn in June. It's too early yet to say what they'll yield, or how deep their roots go. But for now, regionalism looks like an idea whose time has come.

We've written about some of these projects in other posts, but it's an encouraging exercise to review this progress. At the least, it shows that Midwesterners, after years in denial over the state of their economy, have awakened to the realities of coping in a global economy.  

The Mailman Doesn't Deliver Any More

The Midwest embraces a galaxy of small towns, broadcast across the countryside like seed, each a little civilization unto itself. All exist for some economic reason -- as a farm town, a market town, a mining town, a little factory town. Most were founded about 150 years ago and grew up around institutions -- the school, stores, the bank, churches, the post office -- that were both symbols of that civilization and places where the townspeople met to do business, to socialize, or just to talk and swap news.

Most of these towns have been shrinking for fifty or a hundred years, as the economy changed and their young people went away and didn't come back. As the towns slowly evaporated, so did the institutions. The school closed, consolidated into another school in a bigger town next door. As stores closed, so did the bank. As parishioners left, churches shuttered.

Until finally, there was almost nothing left but the post office, still tidy, still official, still flying the American flag, still proclaiming that the town had its own zip code and, hence, an identity. It was real, and it was special. The government said so. 

But now, the U.S. Postal Service, beset by rising costs and competition from the likes of UPS and email, has announced it is considering closing some 3,600 of its 32,000 post offices around the country, about one-fourth of them in the Midwest. There will be a 60-day comment period, and then the final closings will be announced. Some may be spared, a spokesman said, but the final number of closings "will be a lot closer to 3,600 than to zero."  A state-by-state list of post offices under consideration is available here.