Nick Kristof on rural infrastructure and the common good

Nicholas Kristof, former New York Times columnist who is living back on his family farm in Yamhill, Oregon and running for governor of that state, wrote about rural infrastructure deficits last week on his Substack.  This was written after the late December snow storms caused lengthy power outages in Oregon and California.  

Prolonged power outages happen periodically, particularly in rural areas, and earlier this year our home lost power for about six days (the longest I can ever remember power ever going out on the farm).

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[A] population disproportionately left to face the elements on their own are rural people, and not just in power outages, for rural families have been left behind in all kinds of ways. Americans often think of poverty as a problem of inner cities, but Save the Children says rural child poverty rates are higher than urban child poverty rates. Of the counties in the United States with child poverty rates above 50 percent, 93 percent are rural.

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Depending on who does the math, the poorest county is sometimes said to be Holmes County in Mississippi (a rural county with a largely Black population) or Buffalo County in South Dakota (also rural, with a largely Native American population). Here in Oregon, the poorest county is Lake County, with a mostly white population in the south central part of the state.

There are rural areas without either cell phone service or broadband access, so how are children there supposed to engage in remote learning? More on that in a moment, but we have to do a better job bringing cell service and the Internet — and good jobs — to rural and urban communities alike, to knit them into the modern economy.

“I spent my whole life on the farm, and what did I get out of it?” Ron, a childhood friend, lamented to me once. “Debt. Meanwhile, my friends got jobs in the city and did fine for themselves. I wish that years ago I had given up the dream of keeping the farm and had done the same as them.”

Whenever the power goes out, I think with gratitude of President Franklin Roosevelt’s rural electrification, which from the 1930s through the 1950s brought power to so many farms around the country, transforming lives and opportunity. In Yamhill, some farms had set up little water wheels on streams to generate electricity to power a few lights — but most families didn’t have a stream nearby. Then the government strung power lines up, and the community was transformed.

If FDR hadn’t embraced rural electrification, I don’t know when power would have arrived, because it would have been enormously costly to connect farms far from the grid. Some families would have jury-rigged wires running from tree to tree, tied to limbs with baling wire, but this would have periodically caused fires. Rural America would be far less productive and far poorer without government programs that subsidized power.

Perhaps the most direct analogy with rural electrification is with President Biden’s proposals to bring high-speed Internet to areas that have been left behind, both rural and urban. Our own Internet service on the farm comes via a dish behind our house that is pointed at another dish seven miles away; if an owl perches on our dish, our connections waver. And this is a problem throughout rural Oregon. At last count, more than one-fifth of homes in Wheeler County, Sherman County, Harney County and similar rural counties lacked a broadband connection.

When communities lack this kind of infrastructure, the resulting frustration and sense of neglect magnify the distrust of government and proclivity for conspiracy theories and even violence.

Its a thoughtful column from a thoughtful writer with a long-standing engagement with rural issues, in both the United States and abroad.  I've previously featured 

Of somewhat related interest is the fact that Kristof was told by the Oregon Secretary of State last week that he is not eligible to run for governor because he has not lived in Oregon for the requisite three years.  According to Kristof, he has been splitting his time between New York and Oregon, fixing up the old family farm in Yamhill, since 2019.  It'll be interesting to see how this plays out--almost a proxy war between urban (New York) and rural-ish (Oregon)--like Kristof became too east coast, too New York to be absorbed back into Oregon.  What we do know at this point is that Kristof is pursuing legal remedies to reverse the decision by the Secretary of State.