Rural proofing in California? Not when it comes to transportation

This story from today's Sacramento Bee highlights the burden on rural folks imposed by California Governor Gavin Newsom's aspiration to move the state to all electric vehicles by 2035.  The principle of rural proofing, followed in Australia, New Zealand and some European countries, suggests that laws and regulations should be vetted for their impact on rural communities.  It's sort of like an environmental impact statement, but with the focus on rural people and places rather than on the environment.  The practice of rural proofing is a way of ensuring that laws are not disproportionately burdensome on rural people and places, a common phenomenon as our world becomes increasingly urban-centric.  Urban-centricity is certainly a concern in the Golden State, where just about 2% of the population live in rural areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.  

Ryan Sabalow and Philip Reese report for the Bee from Modoc County, a sparsely populated county known for ranching and recreation, in the far northeast corner of the state:

It’s a long drive to just about anywhere Gary Wright needs to go. A rancher in the far northeastern corner of California, he sometimes has to drive nearly 100 miles, one-way, to get to where his cattle graze. It’s 36 miles to Klamath Falls, Ore., for a significant errand run.

There are only a few gas stations along the routes through the forests and high deserts in Modoc County — let alone electric vehicle charging stations. There are none near the rangeland where Wright’s cattle graze.

So he was baffled when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that California would require all new passenger cars and trucks to be electric or “zero-emission” by 2035 to combat climate change.

Prior posts featuring Modoc County are here and here.  And two prior posts about California that also implicate rural proofing or suggest the need for it are here and here. 

Cal ATJ Policy Paper: California's Attorney Deserts, Social Determinants of Health, and COVID-19

Here's an excerpt from the paper, which you can find in its entirety here.   

California faces a statewide access-to-justice crisis, with 85 percent of low-income Californians receiving inadequate or no legal assistance. Low-income Californians need legal services: 60 percent deal with at least one civil legal issue annually, while 23 percent navigate six or more. Yet, just one civil legal aid attorney is available to assist every 5,500 low-income Californians who qualify for their services.

Statewide access issues are compounded by geography. “Attorney deserts” are rural parts of the state and country where there are few or no lawyers. A little over three percent of California’s 200,000 lawyers have offices in rural areas. While the ratio of attorneys to residents in urban areas is 1:175, it decreases to 1:626 in rural areas.

Attorney deserts signal an inadequate supply of attorneys to help rural residents. Yet, these Californians need services: 59 percent of Californians at all income levels living in rural areas faced at least one civil legal issue in the survey year. These critical issues include housing, debt, employment, intimate partner violence, consumer protection, and public benefits. All of these civil justice issues are at the nexus of social and legal problems faced by low- and moderate-income rural Californians.

In the context of COVID-19, attorney deserts hinder people with legal claims stemming from the parallel economic and public health crises from getting legal help. For example, Imperial County has the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 cases in the state and a poverty rate of nearly 20 percent, but just 164 lawyers. Attorney deserts present an entrenched problem for ensuring everyone can participate in the civil justice system to rectify legal wrongs, including those arising due to COVID-19.

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Often Implicate Civil Legal Issues
Access to housing, employment, and public benefits, and domestic violence are both civil legal issues and what public health scholars call “social determinants of health.” Social determinants of health are the “[c]onditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play” that “affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes.” Public health scholars are beginning to recognize that rural attorney deserts are, in and of themselves, a social determinant of health for those living in them. By providing free legal services to help with these matters, lawyers assist clients in both providing redress for legal wrongs and creating more favorable SDOH in the midst of COVID-19 and beyond.

 * * * 

COVID-19, SDOH, and Legal Help
In the context of a legal system that is already inaccessible to many, COVID-19 has rendered access to justice more precarious still. COVID-19 has produced a massive public health crisis that is indelibly linked to an economic crisis. Lawyers play an important role in regard to both the public health and economic crises by ensuring a level playing field in enforcing rights and providing redress for legal wrongs. Many of the civil legal issues arising during the pandemic are interrelated with SDOH. Lawyers can keep people housed when facing unlawful evictions; ensure they have access to the unemployment benefits they are entitled to; and assist a survivor of domestic violence receive a restraining order. All of these outcomes interact as socio-legal determinants of health, specifically regarding the impacts of the pandemic.

* * * 

Conclusion
Attorney deserts are a fact of life for many rural residents. They are a barrier to addressing legal issues that implicate social determinants of health, including quality housing. The public health and economic crises resulting from the pandemic implicate a wide range of civil justice issues. Lawyers must be part of the solution to the legal issues resulting from the pandemic, including eviction defense. Supporting legal aid and pro bono efforts is a necessary aspect of a system that addresses the concurrent legal and social determinants of health arising from COVID-19. At the same time, justice system stakeholders must take steps to achieve long-term solutions to California’s rural attorney shortage.

The rural vote in 2020 (Part VI): Didn't hear any mention of rural in tonight's presidential debate

But I saw this piece from Niskanen Center re-upped on Twitter, with a focus on population density as determinative of political leanings.  Here's the lede:  

In this new paper, I weave recent research in political science, economics, psychology and more into an account of political polarization and the rise of populist nationalism as a surprising and overlooked side-effect of urbanization.

I claim that we’ve failed to fully grasp that urbanization is a relentless, glacial social force that transforms entire societies and, in the process, generates cultural and political polarization by segregating populations along the lines of the traits that make individuals more or less responsive to the incentives that draw people to the city. I explore three such traits — ethnicity, ideology-correlated aspects of personality, and level of educational achievement — and their intricate web of relationships. The upshot is that, over the course of millions of moves over many decades, high density areas have become economically thriving multicultural havens while whiter, lower density places are facing stagnation and decline as their populations have become increasingly uniform in terms of socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, and lower levels of education. This self-segregation of the population, I argue, created the polarized economic and cultural conditions that led to populist backlash.

Because the story of urbanization just is the story of a strengthening relationship between density, human capital and economic productivity, it’s also the story of relative small town and rural decline.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XCII): Small-town Vermont isn't so small anymore--and that's good for the state's coffers and future

Ellen Barry reports on the front page of today's New York Times from Winhall, Vermont, population 769.  Here's an excerpt about how, this spring, "Vermont began to emerge as a model of virus control," which is causing the state's population to grow after years of decline:

As city dwellers scrambled to settle their families far away from hot spots, the state’s regular summer influx swelled by approximately 10,000, estimated Jeffrey B. Carr, an economist who advises Gov. Phil Scott.

State planners are crossing their fingers that many of them, now free to work remotely, will put down roots. The last time that happened in a big way was during the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s and ’70s, when the state’s population grew by 35,000, among them such icons as Bernie Sanders and Ben and Jerry’s.

For years, Vermont’s population has been stuck at around 620,000, a plateau so threatening to the labor force and tax base that in 2018 the state began offering a cash incentive of up to $10,000 for remote workers who moved to Vermont.

Literary Ruralism (Part XXVIII): Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

This excerpt is from Bill Bryson's 2007 memoir of his 1950s childhood in Des Moines, Iowa--not exactly a rural place.  But this excerpt seemed a near perfect description of "white trash," a concept or category often invoked by my mom when I was growing up in rural Arkansas.  And it's interesting because, even though Des Moines is a city, the description of where the "white trash" lived in relation to the city of Des Moines, hints at the rural or, perhaps more precisely, the unruly, something akin to the wilderness adjacent to the city.  Also, the "white trash" hailed from either Arkansas or Alabama, southern places associated with such hoi polloi.  

The only real danger in life was the Butter Boys. The Butters were a family or large interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their specialty was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn't, or possibly just didn't, speak. (It was never clear which.)Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.  

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you'll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It'll be just as boring for you.”

“Don't care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a longtime before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, some-times inadvertently. It wasn't even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy, Poontang sissy,” he said.

‘Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

‘What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

In case you didn't figure it out, Bryson referred to his childhood self as the Thunderbolt Kid. 

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.  

Small towns in the West obliterated by fire (Part V): Growers hunkered down to protect pot farms in the Emerald Triangle

 The Los Angeles Times reports from Trinity County, population 13,786, one of three California counties with no incorporated cities.  Here's the lede for Anita Chabria's story:  

Nate Trujillo sat on a windy ridge and watched California’s largest wildfire, the August Complex, work its way toward the cannabis-growing enclave of Post Mountain-Trinity Pines, where many of the locals are refusing to evacuate.

Law enforcement officers went door to door warning of the danger a few days ago, but “we couldn’t force people to leave,” said Trujillo, a narcotics deputy in the Trinity County Sheriff’s Department. “It’s mainly growers. And a lot of them, they don’t want to leave because that is their livelihood.”

It is a critical time of year in the Emerald Triangle, a three-county corner of Northern California that by some estimates is the nation’s largest cannabis-producing region.

Trinity Pines alone is home to up to 40 legal farms, with more than 10 times that number of illegal grows hidden off its dirt roads, according to people familiar with this part of the Trinity Alps, inland from Humboldt.

Each farm has crops worth half a million dollars or more, and many are within days or weeks of harvest, making growers wary of leaving vulnerable to either flames or thieves. Among the holdouts are numerous Hmong families, originally from Laos and other Southeast Asian countries, who have moved to the area in recent years, along with Bulgarians and Russians and a smattering of neighbors drawn by the remote beauty of towering cedars and firs.

One estimate put the value of the legal crop alone at about $20 million.

Don't miss the rest of the story for some significant insights into the economics of the so-called Emerald Triangle (Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties)--and also insights into why I subscribe to the Los Angles Times, which provides terrific coverage of rural northern California, no matter its distance from the So Cal metroplex(es).  

The rural vote in 2020 (Part V): Eduardo Porter's American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise

New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter first mentions rural people and places on page 7 of his 2020 book:  

[Trump] opened a new divide in American politics, a split between the mostly white homogeneous culture of small-town America in slow but steady decline and the messy mix of the nation's urban hubs.  

The urban-rural cleavage is just an old wound in a new place.  In 2016, rural whites voted in lockstep to preserve what privilege they could despite their demographic stagnation.  Their choice was an extension of whites' long-standing effort to preserve for themselves what America has to offer.

I don't know what he means by "old wound" or "new place."  Is the "old wound" racism"?  Is the "new place" rural America?  I'm not sure.  Also, it's a pity he does not acknowledge the racial and ethnic diversity in rural places, though at least he alls rural places "mostly white homogeneous," so there is some wiggle room there.  

The book's index tells me that "rural areas" are also discussed at pages 24, 67, 117-18, and 200.  I'll report back if and when I make it that far.  

The rural vote in 2020 (Part IV): Pennsylvania

 The "Keystone State," Pennsylvania, has drawn more attention than perhaps any other as regards the "rural-urban" stakes in the upcoming election.  Here are some of the recent stories:

From NPR on Sept. 14, 2020, came this report from NPR's Don Gonyea, "Swing Voters In Northwestern Pennsylvania Weigh In On Fall Election," out of Erie County, population 269,728.  This story treats as significant the distinction between Erie County (rural and exurban) and its county seat, Erie, with a population of just over 100,000.  Here's some background and recent history on the region's voting patterns in presidential politics:  

Across the country, there were only a couple hundred counties that had voted for President Obama when he was on the ballot and then flipped and voted for Donald Trump. One of them is Erie County, Pa. We all know how close Pennsylvania was. Erie County was one of the keys to Trump's victory there. And let's run the numbers. Obama, in '08, won the state by 20 points. He won by almost as much again in 2012. 2016, Trump wins it by 1,957 votes - so, so close.

From the Washington Post, Jenna Johnson reports under the headline, "The latest battlefield in a heated presidential campaign: Front yards bearing Biden signs."  Here's the lede:   

Across Pennsylvania — especially in rural communities — tens of thousands of yard signs supporting Joe Biden have popped up as his fans try to replicate how President Trump showed his growing support in the state when he was campaigning in 2016. And, just as quickly, some of those signs have been vanishing.

It usually happens in the dark of night, local Democrats say, but sometimes in daylight. Sometimes entire streets or neighborhoods are cleared. Pro-Biden Facebook groups have devoted long threads to strategies for deterring sign snatchers — one suggestion involves clear hair gel and pesky glitter, another electrifying the metal frame with a car battery.

While sign thefts are a problem every election year for candidates of both parties — and are an ongoing source of headaches for campaign staffers and party officials — some Democrats in Pennsylvania and several other states insist it’s worse for them this year and illustrates the emotional intensity of the coming election. While there are examples of Trump signs also disappearing, there hasn’t been the same level of public outcry.

From Wilkes-Barre, population 41,000,  Noah Bierman reports for the Los Angeles Times, "Pennsylvania’s blue-collar voters see danger — and back Trump."  Here's an excerpt:  

“There’s always been racism. There’s always gonna be racism, but it’s not him that’s doing it,” Williams, a white, 53-year-old stay-at-home mom, said outside a Walmart. “It’s the Democrats and the media that are getting it out there and keeping it out there. And if the riots don’t get taken care of, it’s just making it worse.”

Williams said she did not vote in presidential elections before Trump came along in 2016. Now, she is an essential part of his 2020 coalition. She lives in Wilkes-Barre, in blue-collar Luzerne County, one of three Pennsylvania counties that flipped from blue to red in 2016 and helped give Trump the state — and a narrow electoral college victory.

About swing voters generally, don't miss The Daily podcast's episode on swing voters, particularly in relation to the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.  

Small towns in the West obliterated by fire (Part IV): Berry Creek, California

Here's the lede for Maria La Ganga's story out of Berry Creek, whose population varies dramatically depending on the source:  

Berry Creek has been many things in its long history — a stagecoach stop, a lumber town, a vacation spot, a gold mining camp. It is home to retirees from crowded, expensive cities, marijuana growers and loners — lots of loners.

Now, Berry Creek has a new and terrible distinction. When the North Complex West Zone fire swept through this wooded enclave about two weeks ago, it killed more people and destroyed more homes here than anywhere else in its destructive path.

Fire Station 61 burned to the ground. Chief Reed Rankin, who heads the volunteer company, lost his home in the blaze. Only one of the seven current or former firefighters still has a house to go back to when evacuation orders are lifted.

See earlier posts about Berry Creek in this series.  

The rural vote in 2020 (Part III): Maine

The Los Angeles Times reports today from rural Maine, though the dateline is Bangor, population 31,000.  The headline for Janet Hooks' story is "Trump and Biden wage a big battle over one electoral vote in rural Maine."  Here's an excerpt:    

Maine is getting an outsized share of Trump love these days.

The president visited a remote town of 1,500 in June. His son and daughter-in-law, Eric and Lara Trump, have stumped in the state. A lobsterman from tiny Swan’s Island spoke at the Republican National Convention in August.

And Joe Biden is paying attention to this corner of Maine, too. Why?

In a quirk of the presidential selection process, Maine is one of only two states — Nebraska is the other — that awards one of its electoral college votes to the winner of each congressional district, instead of handing them out winner-take-all statewide.

This year, Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, the vast rural region north of Augusta, is up for grabs. Trump won it in 2016 by 10 percentage points even as he lost the rest of the state by a wide margin.

The rural vote in 2020 (Part II): Montana

 Here's a story from today's New York Times on the U.S. Senate race in Montana.  An excerpt from Nate Cohn's piece follows:  

A New York Times/Siena College poll of Montana shows a close race for Senate. But it has an important flaw: It named Green Party candidates who won’t be on the ballot this November.

In August, the Montana Supreme Court denied a Republican-backed effort to qualify those candidates on the ballot. An appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected while our survey was being conducted. (They should have been removed from the poll beforehand anyway; the mistake was mine.)

With the Green Party candidates officially off the ballot, the poll is a flawed test of the preferences of Montana voters. .

But it still contains useful information about the attitudes of Montana voters. After all, no survey can ever offer a truly definitive measure of a race. There are many possible sources of error in polling, whether from the inherent imprecision of random sampling; unpredictable turnout; or the potential biases of question wording or interviewer effects. In this case, the flawed ballot test undoubtedly added a source of error. In fact, it’s a reason we know it’s wrong. But the magnitude of the effect is well within the range that we ordinarily tolerate.