Coronavirus in rural America (Part LV): Urbanormativity in policy making

Joe Mozingo reports for the Los Angeles Times out of Nevada County, California, population 98,764, under the headline, "Climbing out from coronavirus: Northern California county sags under weight of economic crash."  The story focuses on the massive economic hit being taken by Golden State counties with tourism-dependent economies, many of them nonmetropolitan.  Some of the folks Mozingo interviews are complaining about metro-normative coronavirus policies that have hurt places like Nevada County, which has seen just 41 coronavirus cases and only one death.  Moreover, 29 of those cases were reported in the Truckee area, which is separated from the county seat, Nevada City, and the commercial center, Grass Valley, by 40 miles of El Dorado National Forest.  The county has not had a new case reported in more than a month; the last was April 28.   

Residents in many of the state’s rugged northern counties, from the Del Norte coast to here in the Sierra foothills, are largely watching the pandemic unfold from afar, as if it were one more nightmare in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Some feel stuck in a blind spot of public debate, lost between the terrible reality of the worst of the scourge and the noisy extremists who call it a hoax.

Their remoteness hasn’t spared them from the economic fallout of the shutdown. And the sparsity of COVID-19 cases in Nevada County has only made the restrictive measures hobbling their livelihoods all the more exasperating.

Mozingo quotes Dan Thiem, who with his wife Erin owns the Inn Town Campground in Nevada City:  

We make 70% of our revenue in three months... And we can’t do that right now.

It’s a colossal failure of leadership on all fronts,” Thiem said. “The plan to deal with the coronavirus is so disjointed, it’s perpetuating it and making it worse for everybody.

The asks are different for different people. I feel like the policymakers are Bay Area-centric, where they say, ‘Just go work from home.’ You know most of our economy here cannot be done from home. So to say, ‘Go work from home because you’re safer’ is different than to say, ‘You need to shut down and bankrupt your business.’

Mozingo continues: 

The state has given no indication as to when businesses like theirs will be allowed to open. Nor has the county. The couple submitted a proposal to the health department on opening responsibly but hasn’t heard back.

[Thiem] feels that until counties like Modoc, Yuba and Sutter began to defy state orders in the last few weeks, state leaders were ignoring the more rural areas where work could not simply shift online.

This complaint reminds me of the theory of urbannormativity or metrocentricity, which I have written about previously on this blog.  It's a particular challenge in a state like California, where less than 2% of the population live in rural areas (as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau's miserly definition of people living in open territory or population clusters smaller than 2500) to get the attention of state-level policy makers.  It also reminds me of the utility of "rural proofing" laws and regulations--that is, considering the particular impact that laws and regulations will have on rural people and places. It does seem to me that, at some point a few weeks into the state's "shelter in place" order, it made sense to defer more to local data and authorities on the re-opening of businesses and the lifting of other restrictions.