|
|
- Info
Public and private issues in nonmetropolitan government
| Author: |
Doherty, J.C. |
| Date: |
1979 |
| Periodical: |
In: Fuguitt, G.V.; Voss, P.R.; Doherty, J.C., eds. Growth and Change in Rural America. Washington, DC: The Urban Land Institute |
| Abstract: |
Between the end of World War II and the early 1970s most Americans were preoccupied with conditions in the large metropolitan areas of the nation. Domestic social history during this period largely centered on events and crises occurring in these areas while domestic political history focused on how our leaders responded to their concerns. Only marginal national attention was given to what might be termed "the outlands," the small cities, towns, villages, and farming communities on the fringes of metropolises and beyond. Unfashionable, uninteresting, unexploitable for political or media purposes, they were pretty much left to a similar fate, which was assumed to be oblivion. Nonmetropolitan America was identified in the urban mind with farming, an occupation millions of Americans were abandoning for the delights of the city or suburb and millions more were hostile to because it seemed to require so much government aid so often. But the reality of what nonmetropolitan areas were and what they were becoming was far different and much more complex. Small, free-standing nonmetropolitan cities were evolving into substate regional centers. While the smallest rural towns were generally in decline, larger ones, particularly in dynamic areas, were growing. Some of the most isolated and depressed areas-the Arkansas Ozarks, northern Michigan, western Colorado-were slowly changing into bustling recreation and retirement communities. Between 1970 and 1976 there was a net in-migration of 2.3 million people to the small cities, towns, and open country areas of nonmetro America, an astonishing reversal of historic trends in the U.S. With this migration came an even more important, and less recognized, result the emergence of new settlement patterns and new ways of living and working that are partly rural and partly urban. The 1970s nonmetropolitan resurgence appears to be rooted firmly in the economic, political, and physical conditions of the decade, as well as in the expressed preference of a great many Americans who in previous eras would have turned their backs on the countryside. However, the nonmetro turnaround brings with it some serious public policy problems: (1) the inadequacy of government at all levels to cope with the needs, demands and opportunities of the nonmetro settlement patterns which are scrambling all the old local boundaries and responsibilities, (2) the lack of standards, rules, and procedures to fashion workable programs of land use management and environmental protection in Countryfied Cities, and (3) the effect of energy costs of these new settlement patterns. Local government, particularly county and township government, is the key but it will need a lot of help-new authorities, more adaptable resources, better managers, greater motivation, all the desirable things so easy to write about and so difficult to make real. Whatever the outcome, the days of urban, small-town America as an object of indifference or derision on the one hand and of pious condescension and sentimental nostalgia on the other are over, for it is in and around the River Cities, Zeniths, Middletowns, and Winesburgs that an important part of the nation's future will take place. |
|
