New California Senate Pro Tem represents a vast rural district, along with some Bay Area suburbia/exurbia

The world of California politics appeared a bit surprised yesterday when the Democratic leadership of the State Senate announced that Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) would succeed Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) as President Pro Tem of the body.  McGuire lives in Sonoma County, toward the far southern (and more populous) end of a massive district that stretches along the Pacific coast from Marin County (on the northern side of the Golden Gate Bridge), up through Del Norte County at the Oregon state line.  His district is, I believe, the second largest of California's Senate districts in land area and includes vast rural areas  The largest is represented by Brain Dahle (R-Bieber) and runs from the Oregon state line south of Lake Tahoe to include Alpine county.      

Here's an excerpt from Politico's coverage of McGuire's ascension to leadership:

McGuire’s term would be brief — no more than 2 ½ years, since he’s termed out in 2026. He and Atkins are negotiating a transition that could begin as soon as January, though the exact timing wasn’t specified.

The decision came after a relatively short period of whipping votes and some brief discussions Monday. McGuire edged out other candidates, including Monique Limón; John Laird; María Elena Durazo; and Steve Padilla.

* * * 

McGuire's ascension comes after months of growing speculation about who would follow Atkins, the first woman and openly gay lawmaker to hold the post. He had pitched himself as an interim leader who can serve as a bridge between an outgoing class of veteran senators and a large group of newer members — some with future leadership aspirations of their own.

The process was devoid of the drama and prolonged leadership clash that just played out in the Assembly, where Speaker Robert Rivas pushed out Anthony Rendon in a fight that fractured the caucus. The Senate leadership contest was worked out within roughly 24 hours of McGuire telling colleagues he had secured the votes. Many senators and staffers also said they had hoped to avoid the Assembly’s fate.

Rivas represents a rural district of a somewhat different sort, one even more focused on agriculture, in the Salinas Valley in central California. 

McGuire has been on Atkins' leadership team since 2022. He has served in the state senate since 2014. He previously served as mayor of Healdsburg and was also a member of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.

I've followed McGuire on Twitter for years and have been pleased to see his concern and advocacy for far northern California's rural reaches, as in Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte counties.  Among the headlines from his Senate page are these, which are relatively rural focused: 

McGuire's Wildfire Survivor Protection Act Stops Mortage Companies from Hoodwinking California Homeowners 

and 

McGuire Secures Policy to put Millions Back into the Pockets of Fire Survivors

Prior blog posts about McGuire's district, which mention the state senator, are here.

Here are some blog posts about McGuire's Republican counterpart, Brian Dahle, from that even more rural and sparsely populated district 1,  which is the inland counterpart of McGuire's and runs contiguous to it for hundreds of miles.  Dahle ran against Gavin Newsom in 2022 for the governorship of California and lost badly.  I see on his recent X (formerly known as Twitter) that Dahle is associated with an anti-crime rally on the Capitol grounds. 

More Elon Musk havoc in rural (well, exurban) Texas

I earlier blogged about the disruption caused by Elon Musk's SpaceX activities in Boca Chica, Texas, on the coast.  Now, the Washington Post is reporting on how residents of exurban Austin--Bastrop County, population 97,216 (so barely nonmetro)--are tiring of the consequences of Musk's undertakings there.  Jeanne Whalen writes under the headline, "Texas welcomed Elon Musk. Now his rural neighbors aren’t so sure":  

Chap Ambrose has always been a fan of Elon Musk. He spent $100 to join the waiting list for Tesla’s first pickup in 2019 and bought internet service from Musk’s satellite provider.

But then the billionaire’s companies moved in next door to the computer programmer, who works from his rural, hilltop home.

Two years later, massive construction sites and large white warehouses have taken over the green pastures where cattle used to graze. Semis barrel up and down the narrow country roads. And the companies — rocket manufacturer SpaceX and tunneling company Boring — are seeking state permission to dump treated wastewater into the nearby Colorado River.

“I just have no faith that the leadership there values the environment and these shared resources,” said Ambrose, who leads a group of local residents pushing Musk’s companies to slow down and address concerns about the environmental risks of the development. “I would say, I’m still a fan [of Elon], but I want him to do better here and be a good neighbor.”

The backlash in Bastrop, a largely rural county 30 minutes east of Austin, shows the dust Musk is kicking up as he builds a new empire in Texas. His companies are spending billions of dollars on campuses across the state, from SpaceX’s rocket launchpad on the Gulf of Mexico to a giant Tesla factory in Austin producing 5,000 Model Ys a week.

* * *

Signs of Musk’s move-fast ethos have mounted in Bastrop County. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has hit the Musk building sites with several violations over poor erosion controls and other matters. Texas’s transportation department reprimanded Boring for building an unpermitted driveway that it said posed traffic-safety concerns, and Bastrop County issued a violation over unauthorized wastewater holding tanks.

New Census Bureau data show exurbia thriving

A story in the New York Times today based on just-released Census Bureau data reveals that many major metropolitan counties lost population between 2021 and 2022, even as immigration boomed in these same places.  An area of overall population growth, however, is what the Times writers label exurban, which includes some areas in the West experiencing gentrification.  Here's an excerpt highlighting the latter trends from the story by Robert Gebeloff, Dana Goldstein, and Stefanos Chen:

Counties identified as exurbs by the American Communities Project account for about 12 percent of the nation’s population, but they could claim about half the national population growth in 2022.

Counties tagged by government economists as specializing in recreational activity account for 9 percent of the national population and 28 percent of the growth in 2022.

Kaufman County, Texas, about 35 miles southeast of downtown Dallas, is among the fastest-growing counties in the nation. Traditionally a hub for ranching and farming, Kaufman County has steadily suburbanized, and also encompasses parts of Cedar Creek Lake, a popular fishing and recreation area. Its population grew by 9 percent in 2022, and stands at 172,000, up from 40,000 in 1980.

Kaufman County became a popular place from which to telecommute during the pandemic, the story explains, and 70,000 homes are currently in the construction pipeline there, with prices in the $250,000 range.  

Regarding amenity rich places, Gebeloff, Goldstein and Chen write: 

Because of their growing populations, many exurban and vacation counties are in economic and cultural flux, said Jaap Vos, professor of planning and natural resources at the University of Idaho.

Affluent newcomers to areas like Sun Valley, Idaho, known for its ski resorts, may bring new political and spending habits and deplete natural resources, he noted — or may not live in their new homes year round.

“They may not care so much about the local coffee store and rather go to Starbucks,” Professor Vos said, adding, “Do they have kids? Can we convince them to spend money in our local stores? Are they as likely to volunteer for organizations or sit on boards?”

Then regarding immigration and natural decline, the story notes:

Overall, three-quarters of the nation’s counties experienced more deaths than births last year, a statistic that is “a rarity,” said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire. In 2018, just 45 percent of counties had more deaths than births.

* * * 

But because the country was aging and experiencing low fertility rates even before the emergence of Covid-19, the numbers point toward immigration as a key driver of future growth. That puts pressure on the country to integrate newcomers into the job market, housing and schools.

This quote from Johnson, perhaps best known as a rural demographer, closes the story, which does not use the word "rural":   

If places are going to grow, it’s immigration that helps.

This is a good occasion to share this recent story from the San Jose Mercury News about Livermore, California, between the Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley and arguably exurban of a sort.  The gist of the story is captured in the headline, "As the Bay Area Urbanizes Around it, Livermore is one of the Last Ag Cities Standing."  The "ag city" juxtaposition is curious--and one that I find confusing.  Here's an excerpt from Will McCarthy's story that perhaps helps to unpack the paradox in that headline:   

From certain places on Darrel Sweet’s ranch near Altamont Pass, the world looks no different than it did 150 years ago. Wildflowers blanket the hillside. A ranch dog named J.J. chases squirrels across a muddy dirt track. Cows stand near a cattle pond, looking out at a range of rolling hills that seem to act as a bulwark against time.

But from one of the ranch’s hilltops, it’s clear that much has changed. Towering wind turbines dot every mountain. To the west are sprawling developments in Dublin. To the south, the suburban center of Livermore.

“When you’re in downtown Livermore, you’d think this place is all developed,” Sweet said. “But it’s not.”

As cities around it have undergone explosive growth, residents say Livermore has maintained a sense of identity tied to its agricultural and ranching history. But that identity has also come into conflict with suburban development and the changing culture of the Bay Area.

Working farms and vineyards still surround the city of 86,000. An ancient ranch, part of the original Mission San Jose, is preserved in the center of town. And at Livermore High School, dozens of students continue to enroll in an agricultural sciences program — the last of its kind in Alameda County.

Thus, as one long-time resident put it, Livermore is a place where "you can find 'a physicist, a rancher, and a gravel pit worker all sitting together at the bar.'”  The reference to physicist is because of the presence of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  

Postscript:  Here is what the Daily Yonder had to say about the new Census Bureau data in relation to rural communities.  

Is Half Moon Bay, California "rural"?

Half Moon Bay, California, population 11,975, burst into the news on Monday afternoon when a gunman killed seven on the outskirts of town.  

I've been to Half Moon Bay a few times, and I have friends who live there.  When I visit, I see the posh parts--like the Ritz-Carlton resort and other somewhat less luxurious coastal hotels and amenities.  Many who live in the small city and nearby communities like Montara commute to San Francisco or over the mountains to Silicon Valley.  I think of it as exurban San Francisco, and it lies within densely populated San Mateo County.  

I was thus surprised to hear NPR repeatedly refer to Half Moon Bay as "rural" in the news coverage the morning after the shooting. 

When I started thinking about it, though, I realized that the town does have rural and agricultural aspects.  In particular, when you approach Half Moon Bay from Silicon Valley (rather than from San Francisco, via Devil's Slide), you drive past nurseries and other agricultural enterprises.  Further, the small city is known for its pumpkin festival.  

There's also the fact that the killings happened at two agricultural establishments--one the Mountain Mushroom Farm where the shooter is said to have lived.  The victims were Asian and Hispanic and all were farm workers, some of them migrant.  The shooter was also a farm worker, and the killings are now being characterized as "workplace violence."  Still, I've found it odd that the place is being depicted as essentially rural, when its character of Half Moon Bay is really much more nuanced than that.  Indeed, as I think about it, it's a great example of dramatic inequality crammed into a compact space.  

NPR's subsequent coverage included this description of the community.  Note the "close-knit" cliche associated with rural places.  

Half Moon Bay is a close-knit community known for its ranching, farming and fishing, officials said in a news briefing Tuesday. That sense of security and closeness was shattered with Monday's tragedy.

Here's how the Washington Post characterized the town: 

In Half Moon Bay, a tranquil agricultural town about 40 minutes from San Francisco, local officials were anguished as their home joined a grim fraternity of American communities scarred by gun violence.

Postscript:  Follow up coverage of the shootings indicates that several of those murdered lived in San Francisco.  This means they had a lengthy commute from a very expensive housing market to farmworker labor.   

This is a characterization of Half Moon Bay from the Los Angeles Times: 

Half Moon Bay is a rural beach town where the bedrock industry is vegetable and flower farms, though many, particularly the flower farms, have closed in recent years, affecting job opportunities. Farm owners have also pointed to the state’s extreme weather, with floods and heavy winds, devastating their fields and the surrounding infrastructure.

About 2,500 to 3,000 farmworkers live in the town at any given time, officials said. Many settle in the wealthy community after finding steady work, often living in mobile homes or trailers on the farms where they’re employed — just a short drive, but out of sight, of the town’s multimillion-dollar coastal homes.

This part of that story touches on the extreme inequality in Half Moon Bay:

Eric DeBode, executive director at Abundant Grace Coastside Worker in Half Moon Bay, said his charitable organization primarily serves the homeless population of the Half Moon Bay area but also farmworkers. The organization runs a farm whose produce is given for free to the very people working low-wage farming jobs that produce much of the area’s food.

A “large portion of folks we serve,” DeBode said, “are making the food we eat and aren’t able to afford it themselves.”

On Thursday, another organization serving farmworkers and other community members was overflowing with goods in the wake of the massacre.

Volunteers were stacking boxes of produce, snacks, eggs, milk and frozen chickens at Ayudando Latinos a Soñar. The group had gathered mounds of clothing, and its food pantry was overflowing from the community response.

A man emerged from a Lexus outside the group’s small, bright yellow building and dropped a bag on a table with a thud. “You said you needed underwear,” he said before returning to his car.

The community’s interest will wane eventually, said volunteer Victoria Sanchez De Alba. But, she said, unacceptable housing conditions for workers will remain: “Why can’t we hold these farm owners accountable?”

She added that, oftentimes when housing violations are reported, “officials red-tag the housing and the families get displaced.”

DeBode called the housing conditions on the farms “shocking” and “deplorable,” adding that farmworkers and the tourists who come to the area “are living in two different worlds.”

Monday’s rampage stunned the entire community. The gunman opened fire at the two rural locations.

The Associated Press also covered the extreme inequality in Half Moon Bay as part of its coverage of the murders:   

The state’s labor department is looking into possible labor, workplace safety and health violations at the farms where the shootings happened, a spokeswoman for the Department of Industrial Relations said Thursday. Newsom’s office said some of the farmworkers told him they made $9 an hour and lived in shipping containers. The state minimum wage is $15.50.

“The conditions farmworkers shared with the Governor ... are simply deplorable. Many workers have no choice but to tolerate the conditions provided to them by their employers,” Newsom spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor said in a statement.

On Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's rurality, and how that helped her win Washington's 3d congressional district

Michelle Goldberg wrote for the New York Times about the race for Washington's 3d congressional district in late September (and I wrote about that column here).  

Now, in the wake of Gluesenkamp Perez's win, Goldberg follows up with her four takeaways from this campaign, including this first one, which touches on rurality:

1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.

Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.

“I hope that people see this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”

For the record, Skamania County's population is just 12,000, but it is exurban Portland.   That said, Gluesenkamp Perez's campaign ads did a great job of playing up the rural parts of her background, showing her on an all-terrain, off-road vehicle on the property she owns with her husband.

Oh, and I don't hold it against her at all, but Gluesenkamp Perez does have a degree from uber liberal and uber urban Reed College in Portland.  

Postscript:  I love this Nov. 19, 2022 tweet from Gluesenkamp: 

It reminds us of her working-class life (the auto repair shop) and her rural life, too (the trees).  It reads:  "First trip to D.C. since 9th grade.  Not enough trees in this town.  There wasn't time to sightsee, just learn the ropes, but I did manage to pick something up for the fridge at the shop."  

Photos from her twitter feed this week also showed her meeting another woman who inspires me enormously:  Mary Peltola, who is now a certainty to retain the seat as Alaska's at-large member of Congress.  

Postscript:  In the Nov. 28 episode of the NPR Politics podcast, Ximena Bustillo awkwardly refers to Glusenkamp Perez's entire district as rural, though it includes the city of Vancouver, Washington, part of the Portland, Oregon metro area.  

Where white majority is fading, election deniers thrive

The New York Times reported last week from several places that are not necessarily rural, but which may be exurban, and where politicians who are election deniers are thriving.  The Times reporters Michael Keller and David Fitzpatrick see a correlation between this phenomenon and a fading white majority.  

The first place featured is Fort Bend County, Texas, which is part of the greater Houston metro area.  Another region featured is far southwestern Virginia, the more rural Buchanan and Wise counties, with populations of 20,000 and 36,000 respectively.  

Here's the gist of the story:    

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

* * * 

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

* * *  

Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70 Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers, currently the longest-serving House member — about 14 percent of residents had four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of Republicans who accepted the election results.

* * *  

Representative H. Morgan Griffith’s [district] in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country. Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an epidemic of addiction soon followed.

Residents, roughly 90 percent of them white, gripe that the educated elites of the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.” They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost everyone but Mr. Trump, who they said championed their cause.

From Marie March, a restaurant owner in Christiansburg, Virginia, had this to say about local support for Trump's dispute of the election results: 

You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up.  We don’t feel like we’ve had a voice.

March attended the January 6 rally and won a seat in the Virginia state legislature last year.   The story continues:  

[March] said she could drive 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and see only Trump signs. No one in the region could imagine that he received fewer votes than President Biden, she insisted.

“You could call it an echo chamber of our beliefs,” she added, “but that’s a pretty big landmass to be an echo chamber.”

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.  

On the midterm race in Washington's (rural-ish) Third Congressional District

This is the feature, "The Midterm Race that Has it All," on the front page of yesterday's Sunday Review in the New York Times, written by Michelle Goldberg.  Here's an except focusing on the rural and working-class elements of the story: 

The question of how you win an election in Washington’s Third Congressional District — a stretch along the southwestern border with Oregon that’s been reliably Republican, voting for Trump by four points in 2020 but still considered fairly moderate — is not just a political debate for right-wing YouTube. The race, pitting [Joe] Kent, a burgeoning MAGA-world star, against Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a 34-year-old rural working-class Democrat who is emphasizing abortion rights, has national implications.

Her father, a Mexican immigrant, was an evangelical preacher; she told me she learned public speaking in his Texas church. She and her husband live, with their 13-month-old son, off an unpaved road in a house they built themselves “nail by nail,” as she likes to say on the stump. Like Kent, she is good-looking, resembling a taller, lankier Winona Ryder, which shouldn’t matter but probably does.

* * *

The shop Gluesenkamp Perez runs with her husband, Dean’s Car Care, employs eight people, and Gluesenkamp Perez speaks passionately about the struggles of both small-business owners and working parents. She often talks about putting infant noise-protecting headphones on her baby registry; because she couldn’t find a day care spot, her son spent a lot of time with her at the auto shop.

“If you think you can spend 15K a year on day care, per kid, and save for retirement, and save up for a mortgage, you’re living in a really different economy than me and most of the people that I know,” she said at one rally.

In high school, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she was so obsessed with civics that she was active in both the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats. It was only when she was a freshman in college and her brother came out as gay that she decided the Republican Party wasn’t for her.

Kent beat Jaime Herrera Beutler in the Republican primary a few months ago. She was one of ten Republicans to vote in favor of Trump's impeachment. 

More excellent reporting on rural and exurban California, from Joshua Tree to the State of Jefferson

I've written several blog posts here about the gentrification of Joshua Tree and surrounding environs in Southern California, in what we call the "Inland Empire."  I've written even more about the would-be State of Jefferson in the far northern part of the Golden State, with a focus on the region's metropolitan hub, Shasta County, where political turmoil has run (especially) rampant in recent months.  Now, two big features in the last few days echo those themes.  The first is in The Guardian, by Lois Beckett with photos by Alex Welsh.   The second is by Shawn Hubler for the New York Times, titled, "The California County Where MAGA Took Control."  Both stories are well worth a read in their entirety--especially by and for Californians.  

Jennifer Rubin on how Democratic legislative wins play in an increasingly rural and exurban congressional district

Rubin's column in the Washington Post is titled, "Democrats are on a legislative roll. That’s great news for this congresswoman."  Here's an excerpt:  

That’s great news for Rep. Kim Schrier, the Democrat representing Washington’s 8th Congressional District. Her district, which is rated as a toss-up, was redrawn to include more rural and exurban areas and leave out more urban parts of the district.

One might think that would pose new challenges for a Democrat, but during a phone interview, Schrier told me that many of the concerns of her voters haven’t changed. “They worried about inflation, gas prices, health care and the cost of prescription drugs,” she said. They’re also worried about climate change, especially the firefighters in her state battling catastrophic wildfires and farmers affected by extreme weather. “These are people on the ground,” Schrier said.

This quote suggests that folks in rural and exurban places aren't so different from their urban counterparts--especially when it comes to kitchen table issues.  

On the housing shortage in the flyover states (and, as one consequence, being Black and moving to a rural, mostly white place)

America's housing shortage got lots of attention this week due to a new report from Up for Growth, "a network of industry groups, academics, public officials, environmental and racial-justice organizations working to solve the U.S. housing shortage."  

NPR did a fabulous and really textured story, prompted by the report.  Among others with housing woes, they featured an African-American couple from Atlanta, Danielle and Colin Lloyd.  Disappointed at their inability to buy a house in Atlanta where the market is really hot, they wound up doing what is called "drive til you qualify."  In their case, that took them an hour from Atlanta to the community of Walnut Grove, population 1,330. Here are their comments about that experience:  

They can both mostly work remotely, so they're not too worried about the commute.

They just moved in a couple of weeks ago. And they are feeling a little apprehensive about being an African American family moving from the city into a tiny rural town that is nearly 90% white, according to census data. There's a bit of a culture clash too.

"Moving to country Georgia where there's an ammo shop down the street, it's like a constant in your face," Danielle says.

But the couple says the neighbors seem friendly. There are other families with kids. So they're feeling hopeful.

"I love the idea of like when the kids are a little older saying, 'Yeah, go play at your friend's house.'" Danielle imagines what it will be like watching them run over to the neighbor's place: "I can see them, like, at the corner, you know. 'I'll watch you ride over there,'" she says. "I love that."

The story also features quantitative data on where the housing crisis is worst.  Not surprisingly, all of the places featured are metropolitan, though some are associated with rurality. In Texas, these include Laredo,  along with McAllen and Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley.   In California, they include Salinas, Modesto and Oxnard/Thousand Oaks.  Also listed is Gainesville, Georgia, which is exurban Atlanta, and home to massive poultry processing infrastructure.  Indeed, many of the places I've listed here are associated with agricultural work and agribusiness.  

The New York Times also published an analysis of the Up for Growth report, along with an interactive map, under the headline, "The Housing Shortage Isn’t Just a Coastal Crisis Anymore."  Here's the lede for Emily Badger and Eve Washington's story:  

San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Washington have long failed to build enough housing to keep up with everyone trying to live there. And for nearly as long, other parts of the country have mostly been able to shrug off the housing shortage as a condition particular to big coastal cities.

But in the years leading up to the pandemic, that condition advanced around the country: Springfield, Mo., stopped having enough housing. And the same with Appleton, Wis., and Naples, Fla.

Among the less well known (albeit not rural) places mentioned in the NYT story: Muskegon, Michigan; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Yuma, Arizona; and Merced, California.  

Bloomberg also picked up this Up for Growth report.  Their headline was "Can I Buy a Home?  Shortage of Housing Becomes Crisis Across the United States." 

Meanwhile, you'll find the blog has lots of past stories on rural housing issues.  

Lots of rural analysis in NYT reporting on Nebraska primary

These excerpts are all from the New York Times feed on yesterday's primary in Nebraska.  West Virginia also held its primary yesterday, but few of the entries on that feed mentioned the rural-urban divide. 

By Reid Epstein at about 7:31 PM Pacific time:

State Senator Brett Lindstrom is running very strong in the early vote in Douglas and Lancaster counties, which include Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska’s two largest cities. Lindstrom, who appealed to moderates and party-switching Democrats, has nearly half the Douglas County vote, but his challenge will come in the state’s vast rural and far more conservative rural counties, which have not yet reported results.

From Epstein, just before the prior post:

If the Nebraska race is close, we will most likely be waiting on results from Sarpy County, just south of Omaha. Sarpy is the state’s third-largest by population and is transitioning from rural to suburban and exurban. It usually reports its results later than the rest of the state, and some recent elections have flipped based on the Sarpy results. And just before that, there was this:

In Nebraska's G.O.P. primary for governor, both the Pillen and Lindstrom campaigns are counting on doing well in Sarpy, Neb. Pillen because Ricketts has been strong there in the past and Lindstrom because his base is the more moderate suburban voters who have recently moved there from Omaha.

And just before that, there was this:

Another good sign for Brett Lindstrom: With 84 percent of the vote in, he’s leading in Dodge County, a rural area about 30 minutes from Omaha where Donald J. Trump won 65 percent of the vote in 2020. If that number holds, it’s bad news for both Jim Pillen and Charles W. Herbster, who are counting on winning the state’s rural areas.

And just before that, this:

As results from the rural Nebraska counties come in, Jim Pillen is about to take a lead over Brett Lindstrom. It will be difficult for Lindstrom, who is getting wiped out in the rural western counties, to come back given how much of the vote from his strongholds of Omaha and Lincoln are already reported.

And before that (say an hour earlier, though the time stamp is fuzzy), there was this:

Some of the same urban-rural divide that showed up in the Ohio Senate primary is clear in Nebraska’s governor’s race, with the more moderate G.O.P. candidate, Brett Lindstrom, winning the cities of Omaha and Lincoln and some surrounding areas but getting crushed everywhere else.

And before that, this

The Nebraska results map looks like a bizarro version of Neapolitan ice cream. Blue (for the moderate, Brett Lindstrom) in the state’s populous eastern counties, yellow (for the establishment candidate, Jim Pillen) in the middle and red, for the Trump-endorsed Charles W. Herbster, in the west.  [The west is the most rural part of the state]

Also of note is this piece by Ted Genoways in the New York Times yesterday, analyzing Trump's influence on Nebraska's politics, especially in relation to Trump's endorsement of big ag dude/conspiracy theorist Herbster.  Here's a paragraph from that essay that explicitly discusses rurality--and which makes an interesting assertion about Obama's role in the Nebraska mess:  

But Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, also attributes the extreme partisan vitriol to the Democratic National Committee’s decision to shift its resources away from rural red states like Nebraska, which was in part because Mr. Obama had slashed the committee’s resources.

“Obama hated the D.N.C.,” Ms. Kleeb told me, “because he feels like they stabbed him in the back” by supporting Hillary Clinton over his upstart campaign in the 2008 presidential primary. Distrustful of the Democratic machine — and the party brand — Mr. Obama turned fund-raising efforts away from the D.N.C. and focused on building “progressive” organizations like Organizing for America, she said. But that created two problems.

On the rural vote in battleground U.S. Congress districts

Josh Kraushaar writes in The Nation under the headline, "Rural voters playing outsized role in battleground House races."  An excerpt follows, suggesting that rural voters matter more than usual in the mid-terms: 

In this year’s House races, a disproportionate number of battleground races are taking place in either rural districts or districts with a significant rural segment. Of the 20 races that are ranked as toss-ups by The Cook Political Report, over half have a sizable rural constituency. It’s a reminder that Democrats can’t take rural America for granted, at least if they hope to hold a House majority for the long term.

Several of the rural House battlegrounds are newly drawn districts, like North Carolina’s 13th, which combines the burgeoning, Democratic-trending Research Triangle exurbs with the deep-red rural outposts of Harnett and Johnston counties. One is a brand new seat, Colorado’s 8th District, which includes parts of Weld County where “cattle sun themselves on grazing land and feedlots,” as The Denver Post put it. Others have always been competitive, like Maine’s expansive 2nd District, home to one of the most independent-minded Democrats in the House.

* * *  

As national Democrats cater to urban, progressive interests, they’ve all but abandoned the rural constituencies that once made up a major part of their coalition.

On the ways in which rural voters have become the margin of difference in recent elections, don't miss this piece on the Virginia gubernatorial race of 2021.   This coverage of Missouri's 2020 vote to expand Medicaid also discusses the role of the rural vote, which generally opposed the expansion but wasn't strong enough to undermine the urban vote in favor of expansion.  

Rural NIMBYism strikes planned electric truck manufacturing plant in Georgia

David Gelles of the New York Times reported yesterday from Rutledge, Georgia, population 781, about 50 miles east of Atlanta.  The headline is "How and Electric Truck Factory Became a Lightning Rod in Georgia."  The subhead is "The governor hailed the factory as an economic boon that would put Georgia at the vanguard of the green economy. Not everyone liked the idea."

And here's an excerpt that gets at the essential conflict about the proposed $5 billion Rivian factory, which would produce 400K emissions-free vehicles a year.  

Protests have at times grown vitriolic. At a public meeting with a local economic development group that supported the project, Edwin Snell, who lives nearby, excoriated the officials, removed his red baseball hat and kicked it at them. “It’s a rural area,” he said to loud cheers. “It’s not an industrial waste dump.”

"Industrial waste dump" sounds like hyperbole, but Snell's spin reminds me of the "property" section (specifically on the topic of "nuisance") of my 2006 law review article, Rural Rhetoric.  Here's a quote from that article, which documented how judges and legislatures tended to see rural property as distinct from an implicit urban norm:  

Courts have often distinguished between rural and urban in relation to various aspects of rights in real property. In the nuisance context, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court (incidentally using a rural metaphor) expressed a key principle in an early land use case: “A nuisance may be merely a right thing in a wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.” With respect to the rural-urban differentiation, this means that courts may be more tolerant of agricultural annoyances in rural areas but less tolerant of other irritations that interfere with the perceived rural idyll. Several states have held, for example, that while a race track is not a nuisance per se, it may constitute a nuisance per accidens under certain circumstances, as in a rural area. Many courts thus more aggressively defend rural areas against nuisances, especially non-agricultural ones, suggesting that these presumptively pristine and quiet areas are especially sensitive to the loud, the smelly, and the ugly. (pp. 187-89).

In any event, the proposed plant has split Georgia's Republican candidates for governor.  David Perdue, the recently deposed Republican Senator, now challenging Kemp for the GOP nomination for governor, is quoted: 

We can grow the economy without selling out and giving our tax dollars to people like George Soros. We can invest in rural Georgia without kicking our communities to the curb.

Soros, a major Democratic donor, owns $2 billion in Rivian stock.  As Gelles points out, there are some conspiracy theories swimming around in this story.  

Perdue's opposition is especially interesting because when he was the CEO of Dollar General, he did plenty to undermine rural economies.  

Don't miss the entirety of the Gelles story, bearing in the mind that the factory is the sort of economic development we typically see rural areas fighting to get.  

Resisting high tech industrialization in exurban northern Virginia

The Washington Post reported a few days ago on a land use conflict out of northern Virginia, in particular exurban Prince William County northwest of the District of Columbia and adjacent to Loudon County.  Antonio Olivo writes about a group of landowners in what is locally known as the "rural crescent" of the county who are trying to sell their land for use as a server farm.  This has created controversy among others residents and land owners who say they have moved to this area in order to live a rural lifestyle, some of them escaping the scrum of the District of Columbia in retirement.  Here's the story's lede:  

Residents along Pageland Lane once would have scoffed at the idea of their farms and regal brick homes becoming the site of a massive data center complex, given all the years of fighting to keep their rural oasis free of Northern Virginia’s relentless growth.

But after a string of defeats that has left their Prince William County neighborhood filled with traffic and towering transmission lines, those residents are now hoping to sell their land so it can become a 2,100-acre hub to the world’s Internet traffic.

“It’s just gotten worse and worse,” said Page Snyder, 71, who grew up on the farm she owns near a Civil War battle site and a sprawling retirement village whose development she and her neighbors opposed. “Basically, we’ve just thrown in the towel.”

Their effort to convince the county to change its land use policy in a portion of western Prince William, where most types of new development have been restricted, sparked a fierce backlash in the broader community — pulling even documentary filmmaker Ken Burns into a larger debate about the changing identity of the fast-growing county that, elsewhere, is struggling with crowded schools and widening pockets of poverty.

Another story about rural data centers, the one out West in Oregon, is here.  

An interesting aspect of this Washington Post piece is something I have seen in California, near Sacramento where I live.  In El Dorado County, for example, just to the east of Sacramento County, one often sees candidates signs with messages like "Keep El Dorado County Rural."  One rarely sees unpacked what this means policy-wise, for example, but it seems to a be a slogan that resonates with many voters.  Another post on the topic is here.  

On rural and urban in the California redistricting process

The San Francisco Examiner today picked up some New York Times coverage about the work of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, including what follows, which speaks to some issues and districts in rural California, including in the Central Valley and exurban southern California.  The tory starts with the announcement of Devin Nunes, who has represented a district in the southern San Joaquin Valley (specifically parts of Fresno and Tulare County) for two decades that he will not run for re-election:  

No longer able to count on his rural, agricultural base, Nunes would have had to win over the gracious neighborhoods along Van Ness Avenue in Fresno, with their verandas and Black Lives Matter flags, and the hipsters of the city’s Tower District, who have more affection for Devin Nunes’ Cow, a Twitter account mocking the congressman, than the man himself. The commission appears intent on giving Latinos in the Central Valley a chance to elect their first representative ever.

Nunes could have moved to a new district taking shape along the Nevada border, which will be heavily Republican, but he chose to go elsewhere. He was not alone in pondering a new future. After losing his San Diego-area seat to a Democrat in 2018, another outspoken conservative, Rep. Darrell Issa, moved to a conservative district abandoned by indicted Republican Duncan Hunter. That seat could end up far more competitive.

The Duncan Hunter district, in eastern San Diego County, is arguably exurban, as is a district that includes parts of northern Los Angeles County, in the area of Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley, which the article also discusses: 

Rep. Mike Garcia, a Republican, won a special election to replace a young Democrat felled by a sex scandal, then shocked Democrats by winning reelection last year by 333 votes in a district that Biden won by 35,000. The commission, however, appears intent on lopping off Republican-heavy Simi Valley from Garcia’s district in north Los Angeles County, leaving him holding on by a thread to a considerably less conservative seat.

Finally, the early maps of the California state assembly and senate districts are out, and they show a single state senate district down the eastern side of the state, from the Oregon state line south to Death Valley.  It is greater than the size of the state of Kentucky and would take 12 hours to travel from north to south.  A screen shot of the map follows (look right to the state's border with Nevada).  The only urban area in this district is in Redding the far north.  Lake Tahoe is roughly equidistant between north and south: 

Rural-urban divide again looms large in France, amidst renewed pressures over climate policy

Here is the New York Times story from Montargis, 75 miles outside Paris.  Roger Cohen reports:  

Three years ago, Montargis became a center of the Yellow Vest social uprising, an angry protest movement over an increase in gasoline taxes that was sustained, sometimes violently, for more than a year by a much broader sense of alienation felt by those in the outlying areas that France calls its “periphery.”

The uprising was rooted in a class divide that exposed the resentment of many working-class people, whose livelihoods are threatened by the clean-energy transition, against the metropolitan elites, especially in Paris, who can afford electric cars and can bicycle to work, unlike those in the countryside.

* * * 

There are plenty of people in the “periphery” who understand the need to transition to clean energy and are already trying to do their part. But if the theme of COP26, as the Glasgow summit is known, is how time is running out to save the planet, the immediate concern here is how money is running out before the end of the month.

Household gas prices are up 12.6 percent in the past month alone, partly the result of shortages linked to the coronavirus. Electric cars seem fancifully expensive to people encouraged not so long ago to buy fuel-efficient diesel automobiles. A wind turbine that will slash property values is not what a retired couple wants just down the road.

This story echoes a common theme in rural areas--where people feel they can't take the long view on environmental issues because their immediate economic needs--most particularly for jobs--are so pressing.   

Earlier posts about the Yellow Vest movement are here and here.   

On being "rurban": A Nordic academic conference

The theme will be "Rurbanity in Nordic Landscapes" when Nordic Geographers meet in February, 2022, in Joensuu, Finland. Abstracts are due by Nov. 12.

 

Here's a description of the concept "rurban."    

The dichotomy of the rural and the urban is one that has been cultivated and reproduced for a long time. One concept is defined by the other and their contestation affects everyday practices, biographical decisions and even institutional arrangements and political agenda. The concepts have long been in the focus of geographers in different research contexts. This session, however, is interested in the mingling of the two and calls for contributions that theorise and inquire empirical data through the prism of rurbanity. Rurbanity (Masuda & Garvin 2008) here is understood not only as a territorial indication, but also includes fusion of practices, movement, lifestyles, interactions, assemblages, hybridities etc. Thus, we call for papers that would assess enacted and experienced rural-urban differences and coexistences.

 This can include community relations, mobilities, narratives, mnemonic practices, heritage management, landscape change, bordering dynamics, institutional reforms, ruralisation of the urban as well as urbanisation of the rural. We encourage the papers to delve on the following questions:

• Do we still have rural and urban landscapes or is it more beneficial to tackle them as rurban landscapes as the logic behind their operation is similar? 

• How has the development of mobilities changed the structural and spatial processes in rural and urban areas? 

• Do these mobilities reproduce the concepts and make them more distinct or do they blur the conceptual borders between the two? 

• What are the relations between everyday practices and the rural/urban conceptualisation? 

• How are the recent social and technological developments affecting the community relations in the context of the rural/urban borders? 

• How are the people sensing these borders? 

• How are migration processes shaping the understanding of the rural/urban borders? 

• How are the contemporary urban elements shaping the rural everyday and what rural elements are affecting the urban lives? 

• How have institutional reforms been shaping the urban/rural dichotomies? 

• How much have institutional regulations been driven by these opposites? 

• How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected the rurban dynamics? 

• Have the borders between rural and urban sharpened or blurred? Why?

Strange bedfellows in California redistricting

That's what the initial California redistricting maps showed, placing the uber-blue City of Davis (as in UC Davis) in the same district as the would-be State of Jefferson, meaning far northern California.  Here are the comments of Nicole Nixon of Capital Public Radio on that clustering, quoting Paul Mitchell, a redistricting consultant.  

Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher according to Mitchell is the state’s northeastern-most district, currently represented by Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa. Under the commission’s visualization, the district remains a sprawling mass covering Redding, Chico and other rural inland areas, but it also includes a piece that reaches down to encompass Yolo County’s Clarksburg wine region and liberal college city Davis.

“There's going to be a lot of lefty vegetarian, latte-drinking Davisites calling into the commission, I think, to tell them that they do not want to be put into that district,” Mitchell said.

Indeed, several Davis residents called into the commission’s public comment period Thursday evening and asked to be grouped with communities in Yolo and surrounding counties, citing shared transportation, water sources and interests with those areas.

Some commission members also questioned why Butte County was separated from neighboring Yuba and Sutter counties, which also have shared interests.

Ultimately, Mitchell predicts the proposed district will change significantly before final drafts are released later this year.

By Tuesday, November 2, the situation had shifted:   

New “visualization” drafts released late Monday show slight changes in the Sacramento region’s potential congressional maps.

Davis has been moved out of a district encompassing rural northeastern California and into a district that includes parts of Yolo, Solano and Contra Costa counties.

West Sacramento is also in that district, now separated from the city of Sacramento. San Joaquin County is split between two congressional districts, rather than three.

And while the maps still contain a district that combines northeast Sacramento County communities with cities in western Placer County, the city of Folsom has been moved to a district that includes most of the Sierra and the far eastern reaches of the state.

Stay tuned for more details.  In the interest of full disclosure, I applied two years ago to be on California's Redistricting Commission, but I was disqualified in the first round, almost certainly because of my record of contributions to Democratic Party candidates.   

The rural housing crisis out west

High Country News reported a few weeks on the housing shortage in the American West.  Here's the lede from Kylie Mohr's story:

Housing is getting more and more expensive in the West, and not just in the region's resort towns and booming tech hubs. A new report from Headwaters Economics, a community development think tank, digs into recent trends on record-breaking housing costs. “What was very apparent to us is that these unprecedented price increases that we’ve been seeing lots of anecdotes about aren’t isolated,” said Headwaters Economics researcher Megan Lawson. “It’s incredibly widespread. It’s not just limited to the Bozemans and the Boises. It’s ubiquitous.”

Nationwide, 607 counties saw a record rise in housing costs between 2020 and 2021, 134 of them in the West. Why is the West affected? Lawson ticked off a few hypotheses: Local housing stock is expensive relative to local wages, but it’s generally affordable to people from bigger metropolitan areas. At the same time, the pandemic is driving migration to areas with amenities and a high quality of life. It’s created a perfect storm of growing demand — and that drives up prices.

And here's a story from the Colorado Sun out of Silverton, population 637, in San Juan County in the southwest corner of the state.  Shannon Najmabadi reports under the headline, “Glorified homelessness”: Even tiny Silverton is experiencing the housing crisis that’s crushing mountain workers."  The subhead is, "Colorado’s housing shortage is exacerbated in remote Silverton, where there are no suburbs to commute from and little space to expand."  The story suggests that rents have as much as doubled in a year.  

Here's a resource on the rural housing crisis in California.  

Postscript:  This story illustrates another downside to the West's rural housing crisis--building and buying in the wildland-urban interface, which is particularly susceptible to fire.  

A photo essay on rural Michigan Post Offices

It's from The Belt Magazine, by Josh Lipnik, and features all purpose-built "modernist" style structures built after WWII.  Sharing here since I've shared so many photos of rural U.S. Post Offices over the years.