A modest proposal: Leaving

Torn down building in Shiloh Mountain area, Arkansas
© Lisa R. Pruitt, 2011

The Washington Post's 2017 article "Disabled and Disdained" tells the story of the McGlothlins, residents of Grundy, Virginia, who have fallen on hard times. The patriarch of the family is in jail after struggling with addiction. One of his sons shared the same fate. Sheila, the matriarch, lives on $500 a month in disability payments. Tyler, her 19-year-old son, lives in the household with his wife Morgan. Neither works. Tyler panhandles to supplement his mother's income. The article wants the readers (or at least that it is my impression) to feel sympathy for Tyler. Tyler did things right. He graduated high school, stayed clean, avoided unwanted pregnancies, got financial aid, enrolled in community college, and bought a car. Then, he lost his license as the result of a car accident, and as a result was unable to keep going to school. The article also describes a man named David Hess. Hess is an almost absurd character. He crossed paths with the McGlothlins when Tyler's father was out on the streets panhandling. Hess offered McGlothlin a job, but the McGlothlin patriarch refused on account of his work injuries. Outraged, Hess proceeded to chastise him (both in person and online) for his idleness. And yet, by the end of the article, I found myself sympathizing with Hess more than I did with Tyler.

Being 19 years old

In 2018, I was 19 years old, just like Tyler. I had been in the country for a couple of years by then. I rented the living room floor of a relative's apartment for $350 a month. I say floor because I slept on the floor. I did not have to, but doing so was more comfortable than sleeping on the couch, and so that's what I did. In those days, I worked full time as a shift leader at Carl's Jr. (although, due to my coworkers' chronic absenteeism, I often worked overtime), and I was simultaneously enrolled full time at Sacramento City College. I took the bus to both, spending several hours a day on it. I met a lot of curious characters on those buses (e.g. a man, who by my best guess was from Panama, who had made it routine to tell me he was going to kill me). I thought life was pretty good. One of my classes that semester was English Composition II. The class was taught by a professor whose name I have unfortunately long forgotten. The professor was a South African woman, advanced in years, and clearly well read. She taught us how to make proper use of the English language. She taught us about how we were not supposed to say "terrorist," since "freedom fighter" was the correct term. When asked whether Osama Bin Laden was a terrorist or a freedom fighter, she said he was a terrorist. English is a complicated language. The overarching assignment for the semester was an essay on a book titled Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Shepard's job of choice in Scratch Beginnings
© Aim 2 Please Moving

Ehrenreich and Shepard

Nickel and Dimed follows journalist Barbara Ehrenreich as she goes undercover working a variety of minimum-wage jobs. In the book, Ehrenreich describes her experience in those jobs as difficult, injury-inducing, and soul-crushing. The wages she earned were not enough to cover her basic needs, and Ehrenreich, despite her best efforts, ate into the modest amount of savings she set aside for the experiment. The book's conclusion is grim: the American working poor are trapped, with very little-to-no hope of escaping despite their best efforts.

I was not convinced. My task that semester was to write a four- or five-page essay on the book. On account of a flare up of chronic contrarianism, I set out to find a book which was the antithesis to Nickel and Dimed, one which I could wield as a club against it in my essay writing process. I did not have to look for very long. Scratch Beginnings, by Adam Shepard (who, according to his LinkedIn page, is the co-founder of a brand named "Practice Empathy"), is a direct response to Ehrenreich. Shepard, a 23-year-old recent college graduate, started from scratch in Charleston, SC (a city he was unfamiliar with) with nothing but $25 in his pocket. He deliberately avoided using his degree, his connections, or any advantage not available to the general public. Ten months later, he had bought a truck, saved over $5,000, and by his account made friends and even gotten physically stronger. I echoed Shepard's criticisms of Ehrenreich in my essay and got a B. Curiously, I was not docked for the blatant contrarianism or lack of effort, but for using male pronouns a bit too much (such as when saying "if he did so..." instead of "if she did so..."). I explained to the professor that I only wrote that way because my own inner voice was male, and that was being reflected in my writing, but such an explanation was not sufficient. My core criticism of Ehrenreich, then and now, is that her experiment was unrealistic. Sixty-year-old women do not spawn into the world with nothing. In sixty years, a person accumulates skills, connections, and at least the opportunity to save. Her starting point was not a true starting point. Almost every story is a tragedy when the only thing you write is the final chapter. 

Who keeps Tyler home?

Tyler is the opposite of a 60-year-old woman. His story has really just begun; at 19, he has just entered the "agency" part of the human experience. And yet, throughout the article, I couldn't avoid the feeling like I was reading the last chapter of a story, not the first. What exactly could be the reason for that? My main suspect is the town of Grundy itself. Grundy has a population of 875 residents, distributed among 300 households and a bit under 200 families. Of these households, only about one-fifth have children at home. In the last decade, Grundy lost almost 15% of its population. With such conditions, it is not entirely unexpected that there is a lack of good jobs there. Explaining why there are no good jobs is harder. It certainly is at least partially caused by a variety of policy choices made by people far away from the McGlothlins (deindustrialization, climate policy, trade, and many more). Maybe it's just bad luck.

But a lack of good jobs cannot be the end of the inquiry. Tyler's life was more or less on rails before a few events derailed it. He lost his job at McDonald's after missing a shift due to a snowstorm, and he lost his ability to go to school after losing his license as the result of a car accident. Perhaps I am being a bit too cynical, but I doubt that a simple snowstorm and a "car accident" is all that happened. To be clear, I am not accusing Tyler of anything. However, these descriptions do not match at all with my lived experience. What kind of employer fires an employee over missing work once because of a snowstorm? I have worked a variety of jobs in food and retail, and I cannot remember even a single instance of someone being fired due to one episode of (justified) absenteeism. In all the jobs that I have had, when a person missed work due to other commitments, forgetfulness, or just being too busy doing drugs, nothing happened. At worst, they got a write-up. Businesses generally don't like to get rid of  good (or even mediocre) employees for minor absences or tardiness. Training new employees is a cost that most businesses would rather not bear too frequently. Similarly, it seems unusually harsh to take away a person's license over an accident in which they had little fault. Virginia is perhaps harsher than California in this regard, but this is still suspect. Here we come to two policies that could help a person such as Tyler, but which I am unconvinced would do the trick: (1) more stringent laws against wrongful termination, and (2) more lenient penalties for traffic infractions that result in accidents.

But even the lack of any jobs and a driver's license cannot be the end of the inquiry either. If the idea is that rural areas have a high density of acquaintanceship, was there truly not a single person in Tyler or his family's entire social network who could get him closer to a bus, or to school, or a place with jobs? Is Grundy really so far from everything? A quick search reveals that the closest metro area to Grundy is Kingsport, TN (population ~55,000), about a 2-hour-drive. This is a significant (but not insurmountable) distance, and it may explain the lack of opportunities. There are seemingly no public transportation options that would cover that trip either. Here we arrive at yet another policy that could help Tyler's situation: more extensive public transportation options. Admittedly, I have not seen a "commuter" route that stretches as far as the one Tyler would need, so its feasibility is debatable.

Rural people, immigrants, and subsidies

Venezuelan immigrants in Ecuador.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there isn't a single job available in Grundy; and, assuming also, that Grundy is simply so remote that it is literally impossible to commute by any means (whether public or private) to any other place where a job might be found, that raises the final question: why not move? How could things be worse anywhere else? I have looked for a satisfying answer to why people in economically depressed areas resist moving, and I have not found one.

As an immigrant, I find the resistance to moving genuinely difficult to understand. If life is so bad where you are and economic prospects are better elsewhere, why stay? I understand loving a place. Most immigrants from my country to the United States that I have met have expressed that they would like to go back some day. Many have expressed that, even if not possible during their lives, they would like to at least be buried back at home (it almost never happens, but it is a really nice sentiment). However, even with attachment considered, isn't leaving and returning with more resources a more productive approach? From my perspective, the McGlothlins' situation resembles something close to the natural, baseline state of things. What historically propels families out of such circumstances is a willingness to take risk, usually when things cannot get any worse. Usually, one member, often male, ventures somewhere harder and less comfortable, lives cheaply, saves aggressively, and slowly creates a foothold for others to follow. It is usually not pretty, but it's also a practice not unique to international migrants.

What I cannot relate to, in terms of my own lived experience, is the $500 in disability payments. Sheila's disability payment is also a policy choice. So is every other federal and state subsidy or program that flows into a place like Grundy. I want to be careful with my words, lest the spirit of David Hess fully take over me. I am not arguing that the government should abandon people in hard circumstances in order to force a sink-or-swim outcome. If the government did, a lot of people would undoubtedly just sink. I am asking whether support sometimes functions as an anchor. Tyler is not facing a choice between certain misery (staying) and possible misery (leaving). He is facing a choice between possible misery (leaving) and a small, predictable share of $500 (staying). There is a Spanish refrain which roughly translates to: "A bird in your hands is worth more than 100 in the sky."

Conclusion

Which brings me to a question that has loitered in my mind for the entire time I spent writing this post: at what point does subsidizing rural and remote areas just become subsidizing misery? Maybe the "death" of places like Grundy (or in less scary terms, their transformation) would benefit everyone, especially the people who live there. And maybe, what is slowing that transformation down is the accumulated weight of everyone's personal share of $500. I did not mean for this post to sound so negative. I do not think the McGlothlins are contemptible people. But perhaps there is something to the contempt that the David Hesses of the world display.

Energy poverty burdens rural America, especially as the climate warms

Mt. Sherman, Arkansas 

Credit: Lisa R. Pruitt, 2009

Rural areas produce much of the energy that our nation relies on. Sixty percent of coal plants are located in rural areas, and 83% of wind, solar and geothermal energy is produced in rural regions. Even so, families living in poverty in rural areas are more likely to experience energy poverty. Energy poverty is the inability to pay utility bills to heat or cool a home. A report by the Island Institute explained that the median energy burden (percent of income spent on energy bills) is 33% higher for rural households than the national median. 

Inability to pay for utilities can increase exposure to heat or cold, leading to various health risks such as respiratory issues, heart problems, allergies, and kidney disorders. Climate change has exacerbated exposure risks due to the greater frequency of extreme weather conditions.

Rural areas face these energy inequities because of rising energy costs and a lack of investment. Across the country, residential electricity costs have increased 30% since 2021 and residential gas costs have increased 40% since 2019. The geographic isolation of many rural areas makes it more expensive to deliver energy and provide energy efficiency upgrades. 

Investor-owned utilities in the early twentieth century didn't want to provide the same service in rural areas as in urban areas because the lower population densities in rural areas made profits too low to justify construction and investment. In 1935, the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) was created. The REA utilized a "rural cooperative model" which allowed for publicly owned and controlled electricity. While this cooperative model has some benefits, rural cooperatives often lack capacity and resources to invest in more comprehensive energy efficiency programs. 

Additionally, rural areas are more likely to have older homes with worse insulation. In addition to houses being older, 20% of rural households live in manufactured homes (commonly called mobile homes), which are significantly less energy efficient and more costly to repair than traditional housing. 

AC Unit on Mobile Home

Credit: Creative Commons

How do we currently address energy poverty?

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) is a federally funded program that provides assistance to low-income households who face a high energy burden. Assistance can range from one-time financial assistance to free energy efficiency upgrades. A study done by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that weatherizing a home for families living at or below 200% of the federal poverty line can save an average singe family household $283. These savings are even greater for those living in manufactured homes per year and manufactured homes, at $458 per year.

Katrina Metzler from National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition explained that rural areas have a harder time accessing LIHEAP benefits because the resources are not centralized as they are in urban areas. A 2024 survey found that only 17% of households that qualify for LIHEAP assistance utilize the program. 

LIHEAP's funding formula has historically provided more funding to cold-weather states. But climate change has caused a shift in the historical energy burden being faced by rural communities. Extreme heat is now the primary cause of weather-related deaths, with 2,302 heat-related deaths in 2023. This is a 44% increase from 2021. With rising temperature, regions such as the South and Southwest have greater cooling needs, while the heating needs in regions such as the North and Northwest have become less extreme. 

LIHEAP is still using a funding formula from the 1980s to determine how funding is distributed to states. With the changing climate, it may be time to shift the funding formula to better aid states struggling with extreme heat. 

Credit: ACEEE

What are states doing?

Nine states have implemented percentage-of-income payment plans (PIPPs). This type of program caps energy bills at a specified percentage of household income for low-income customers. Fourteen states provide low-income households energy at a discounted rate to keep costs low.

Additionally, 10 states offer arrearage management plans, which forgive a portion of debt for each timely payment of a new bill. This helps to defeat the energy bill debt cycle that many households in energy poverty face. One missed payment can turn into growing debt that threatens disconnection from service, forcing households to pursue risky options such as emergency aid or high-cost loans. 

The Rocky Mountain Institute modeled the cost of a universal PIPP, capping bills at 4% of annual income. They determined it would cost only $9.3 billion to fund this program, 0.14% of federal spending in 2024.

In 2024, Congress appropriated $4.125 billion in LIHEAP funding. Last April, the Trump administration sought to completely cut funding for LIHEAP, but full funding was eventually included in the appropriations package passed in February of this year.

LIHEAP is an essential program to ensure that rural households have some assistance with the crushing costs of utilities. Implementation of PIPPs, ideally at the federal level, could drastically reduce the burdens of energy costs on low-income rural families and prevent them from having to choose between buying food or having air conditioning during severe heat. 

"Rural" all over the news as Senate passes "Big Beautiful Bill" that will undermine rural services, especially health care

Analysis of what Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" would do to rural health care has been in the news for several weeks, and it stayed there today as the Senate passed the Bill by a vote of 50-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie.  

What follows appeared on the Ezra Klein Show today, July 1, but much of it was recorded in advance in anticipation that the bill would pass.  Here, I'm just going to highlight the bits about rural health care, including as they relate to "red state" voters: 

Klein: [T]hey are very substantially cuts to the Republican Party’s voters. They’re cuts to Republican states. They’re cuts to Republican hospitals — rural hospitals in areas that vote for Republicans and are very dependent on the care that gets financed by Medicaid in order to stay open.  (emphasis added)

This is the Republicans’ old ideology coming into conflict with their new coalition.

Yglesias:  Absolutely. If you look at the share of people who are on Medicaid by state, there are seven states where more than a quarter of the population is on Medicaid.

One of them is New York, and one of them is California. But the other five are New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia.

And then you look at states like Mississippi and Alabama: If they would accept Medicaid expansion funding, there’s a huge, potentially eligible population share in those states.

It’s a big conflict inside the heart of Republican politics. [Details about Mitch McConnell and Kentucky] 

There’s just a conflict between the Republican Party electorate and their ideology, which has shifted in some ways but really remains focused on low taxes, on investment income, low corporate taxes and wanting to cut spending on programs for the poor.

About work requirements and how they've worked out so far, Klein and Yglesias shared this conversation:

The most conservative states don’t accept Medicaid expansion funds. They have tried to impose work requirements in Arkansas, for example.

(Read more about the Arkansas experiment here and here.) 

So we ran the experiment: Does putting work requirements on Medicaid increase employment? And the answer was no. When they did it, employment didn’t go up. People did lose coverage, but employment didn’t go up.

And Republicans didn’t reverse course after that. They didn’t say to themselves: Oh, our goal here was to get more people working, but we didn’t succeed at that. They said: You know what? This cut the rolls. It cut spending. We’re happy with that.

That’s a free market view: If you want a television, you’ve got to pay for it yourself. If you want chemotherapy, you’ve got to pay for it yourself.

On work requirements, I published this three years ago in Politico.   

Here's more from Yglesias, on perverse incentives: 

There’s this threat that hospitals will go out of business. I’m in Maine right now in a very rural area, and hospitals don’t have a ton of customers here. If they lose let’s say 10 percent or 15 percent of their customer base and have higher uncompensated care burdens — some of the facilities will just close.

Senate Republicans have discussed creating a hospital bailout fund to prevent this, but it seems crazy to me to address hospitals’ business model problems by giving them direct payments to stay in business even though they’re not treating patients, rather than just letting people get the treatment they need.  (emphasis added)

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska ultimately voted for the bill, but only after she was offered big concessions for her state.  Read more about those here.  Apparently, one of those concessions was to double to $50 billion (from an initial $25 billion) the amount in a fund that would support rural hospitals.  Another related to how SNAP will be administered in Alaksa. 

Also instructive is this interview by NPR with Kaiser Health News reporter Sarah Jane Tribble, published yesterday, leading with Juana Summers questioning Tribble: 

SUMMERS: Rural America is poised to be greatly impacted by these proposed cuts. Roughly 20% of the U.S. population lives in rural areas where Medicaid covers 1 in 4 adults. Here to talk about what could be at stake for those communities is Sarah Jane Tribble. She's the chief rural correspondent for KFF Health News. ...

Sarah, just start if you can by telling us a bit about what you have been hearing from people in rural communities across this country about these proposed cuts.

TRIBBLE: Yeah, I'm not hearing good things. They're very concerned, because Medicaid rates are so high in rural America, that these cuts will be very detrimental, they'll cause more hospitals to close, they'll tax rural health clinics. I was sitting next to a CEO of a rural hospital from Colorado. He has a 25-bed critical access hospital, the only hospital between the Kansas border and Denver on the Colorado I-70 corridor. And he had been talking about the cuts and not happy about them. And then we heard about the rural transformation fund that the Senate has been working on to sort of help offset the cuts. And he leaned over and he just scoffed. He just said, that's just not going to be enough. So I think that there's a lot of concern out there in rural America.  (emphasis added) 

Here's a late June NPR story about the ripple effects the cuts are likely to have on hospitals in rural Colorado, this one focused on the San Luis Valley in the southwest part of the state.  Here is a key excerpt from the story by John Daley: 

"I'm trying to be worried — and optimistic," said Konnie Martin, CEO of San Luis Valley Health in Alamosa. It's the flagship health care facility for 50,000 people in six agricultural counties — Alamosa, Conejos, Costilla, Mineral, Rio Grande and Saguache.

The numbers out of the bill about deep Medicaid cuts were "incredibly frightening," Martin said, "because Medicaid is such a vital program to rural health care."

Martin's hospital is not alone. "I think in Colorado right now, nearly 70 percent of rural hospitals are operating in a negative margin," in the red, Martin said.

Here's a late June Washington Post story about Medicaid as a "lifeline" in West Virginia.  

Housing Assistance Council launches Rural Data Central

You can access this important new resource here.  It has sections on 

• Rural people and places
• Society
• Economy
• Housing
• Mortgage and Housing Finance
• Federally Assisted Housing

The Housing Assistance Council reports that the website 

is designed as a resource to help rural communities, organizations, and decisionmakers with data to inform strategies and solutions. Rural Data Central compiles over 275 million data points into one accessible and easy-to-use tool. Sign up for Rural Data Central today to get the data you need for your community.

With so little data available that teases out rural difference in various sectors, I'm excited about this new rural-focused source of quantitative data.  

Death of the American Dream for rural America

Is the American Dream ("the Dream") dead? The Dream posits that success results from work and sacrifice rather than the circumstances in which one is born. However, in recent years, some have argued that the so-called Dream is illusory, used only as a "strategic and intricate device crafted to keep you where you are." Antagonists propose that the Dream only adds wealth to the rich while keeping dream-chasers on the hamster wheel. 

The Dream can be measured by analyzing generational mobility, which refers to whether an individual's social and economic opportunities depend upon their parents' income or social status. Less generational mobility suggests that the Dream is dead or dying, and more mobility indicates the opposite. Upward mobility means that an individual was born to parents in the bottom 25% of income earners and that they later fall within the top 25% of income earners in America. 

According to most data, residents of rural counties are more likely to be persistently poor, with at least a 20 percent poverty rate persisting for at least 30 years. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, "In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst."

According to some researchers, five factors directly correlate with generational mobility: (1) residential segregation, (2) income inequality, (3) school quality, (4) social capital, and (5) family structure. Rural counties have lower incomes, levels of educational attainment, life expectancies, and limited access to health insurance and healthcare providers than their urban counterparts. Why, then, do some rural counties have the highest upward mobility rates in the country but also some of the lowest? 

Perhaps another factor—the ease of migration from rural communities to urban ones—can explain this seeming disparity. Is the solution to "attaining" the Dream to be born into a rural community and leave as soon as possible for an urban one? If leaving is the only answer, should the Dream even be considered a dream?

Supposing that achieving the Dream for rural people is premised on leaving their community, each pursuit diminishes the Dream for those left behind. If the best and brightest pursue education or economic opportunities elsewhere, growth remains stagnant for the home community. Published by The Sun, a U.C. Davis law student references Fresno's inability to attract educated professionals, a phenomenon called "brain drain," the migration of educated and skilled individuals away from their home region. His solution to attract young professionals includes increasing career opportunities, housing, arts, entertainment, and sports.

While stagnant growth may be one side effect of the Dream, one more insidious issue is the Dream's tarnishing effect. If everyone can succeed, why do unsuccessful people exist? Like Vice President J.D. Vance, proponents of the Dream argue that lack of success results from laziness. However, those proponents forget what the evidence proves—a lack of resources impacts the likelihood of success. Often, proponents of the Dream ignore their privilege to bolster their ego and achievements.

Like most things, the Dream may be aspirational in most parts of America. Nevertheless, it seemingly impedes and damages rural America's vitality. It is okay to recognize that dreams vary between people and places. Arguably, for rural America, the question is not whether the Dream is dead but whether it should be.

How marijuana funds schools in rural Colorado

Colorado in 2012, via state-wide referendum, voted to legalize recreational-use marijuana, becoming (alongside Washington) one the first states to do so. One of the campaign promises of legalization in Colorado was the promise that the excess tax revenue generated by legalization would be used to help fund construction projects in public school districts.

Most of these extra funds are distributed through BEST grants (Building Excellent Schools Today) which are used on these construction projects. While the tax breakdown changed in the initial years following legalization, in 2019 the Colorado House passed House Bill 1055, which demanded that 100% of all funds raised by the excise tax on wholesale retail marijuana was dedicated to BEST grants, to be distributed based on an application program available to all public school districts in the state.

As stated on the Colorado Department of Education website (where a school district will start their application for a grant), “BEST grants are competitive, awarded annually and in most cases must be supplemented with local district matching funds.” In order to be awarded a BEST grant then, it is highly likely that a school district, to be competitive, must be able to help supplement a large chunk of the funding.

An overview of BEST grants awarded from the 2019/2020 to 2024/2025 school years bears this out. For the 2019/20 cycle, money supplied by the districts represented 41.18% of the money used for the projects; for 2020/21 it was 47.11%, in 2021/22 it was 45.36%, in 2022/23 it was 43.85%, in 2023/24 it was 41.42% and in 2024/25 it was 34.86% (a compiled list of excel documents from the Colorado Department of Education website detailing BEST Grants from 2019-2024 that has the raw data referred to throughout this blog post can be found here).

It seems it can be hard for rural districts to put up the money to be competitive for these grants. In every year from 2019 to 2024, districts that would have been awarded grants, but were denied due to lack of supplemental funding, were exclusively rural districts (with two exceptions in 2020-21, when a project in Boulder and a project in Pueblo were unable to raise the funds).

It is worth looking at a specific example of how this system of requiring matching funds can directly impact the rural school districts that need the resources. In the 2024/25 grant cycle, school district North Park R-1 in Jackson County, Colorado requested a $52,713,524.19 BEST grant for replacing the Preschool to 12th grade school in the district that serves 150 students, where about 50% of students come from poverty (according to the school district-not the official census data). The grant requested the state of Colorado to help replace the only school that is in North Park R-1. The building is almost sixty years old and is “challenging to work around [] due to the asbestos that is commonly found in buildings of this age.” North Park R-1 was denied, due to being unable to raise the $19,032,673.00 they needed to raise in supplemental funds. The failure to raise the funds can hardly be shocking, as the median household income in Jackson County (according to the 2020 census) is $41,809 and the yearly revenue of the school district is $4,854,820 (with yearly expenditures of $4,765,740). In order to raise the supplemental money for the BEST grant, there was a $20 million bond placed on the November 2024 ballot. The bond, proposed by the school district, would have involved a small raise in property tax on the residents to pay for the roughly $20 million supplement-the increase would max out to $1.8 million in new taxes raised each year.

Jackson County, who voted for Donald Trump by 55 points, failed to pass the bond measure. The small rural community in Jackson County can hardly be blamed on not wanting to raise property taxes in a community that has many families who live on a small/fixed income, and who are facing shrinking enrollment in their school district.

It is not that the BEST grants alone can be blamed, but in the 2024/25 cycle, all of the denied BEST grants (due to lack of supplemental funding) were projects asking for new schools, or drastic renovations to existing schools, in small rural districts. It helps showcase the broader trend, that these small rural districts are working with outdated buildings and worse resources, and state programs that are meant to help are still leaving them in the dust.

When will women in rural Missouri have true abortion access?

On November 5, 2024, as much of the country watched Donald Trump regain the presidency, abortion advocates in Missouri celebrated. Amendment 3, a ballot proposition to repeal Missouri's total abortion ban, had passed. Missouri was one of seven states that enacted amendments to protect abortion rights on November 5. And in a state that Donald Trump won by over 18 points, voters had somehow simultaneously restored the right to abortion by a narrow margin of 52 to 48 percent. For abortion advocates, passing Amendment 3 was a hard-fought but undeniable victory. 

Then, the question became: "What's next?"

For rural Missourians, the answer is complicated. Over the past few decades, Missouri has severely limited abortion access. Hit hardest were women in rural communities. For years, there were only three abortion clinics in Missouri, which has a population of over 6 million. By 2017, a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis was the only place in the entire state you could get a medical abortion. And in 2022, Missouri passed the "Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act," a trigger ban that months later became the first in the nation to go into effect when Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. 

This was the landscape framing desperate efforts to restore medical access to abortion in Missouri. But celebrations fell quiet in weeks after the election as anti-abortion advocates began to respond. Elected officials in Missouri pledged to "vigorously defend" abortion bans in the state. On January 16, 2025, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced federal legislation to defund Planned Parenthood. I felt my own stomach churn when my little sister, a veterinary student at the University of Missouri, texted me: "I'm getting anxious. About living [here]." 

One-third of Missourians live in rural areas. But even those in urban counties have felt the effects of the decades-long effort to restrict access to abortion. Columbia, Missouri, where my sister lives, has a population of 130,000. But it's over a two hour drive to St. Louis, where the sole abortion provider in Missouri is located. Rural Ozark County ⁠— which has a 29.6 percent poverty rate, the highest in the state — is a four hour drive from St. Louis. Not to mention travel costs, medical expenses, and scraping together time off work — all challenges exacerbated by rurality.

While Amendment 3 granted abortion access until the point of fetal viability, the St. Louis Planned Parenthood cannot legally resume providing abortions. This is, in part, due to a December ruling by Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang which upheld licensure requirements for abortion clinics — meaning that though Missourians have a renewed right to abortion, there is no place for them to obtain one. This leaves rural women in Missouri vulnerable, particularly those in the southern half, where the nearest abortion clinic might be several states away. 

However, progress was made: In the same opinion, Judge Zhang struck down other restrictive laws, including a 72-hour waiting period and a requirement that physicians who perform abortions have admitting privileges in all hospitals that provide obstetric or gynaecological care within "30 minutes or a 15-minute drive." Judge Zhang considered rural Missourians in the decision, writing that: 

[A] person who travels three hours to get a medication abortion and then returns home, would not benefit from [these restrictions]. If complications arise after taking the medication, the individual would need to seek emergency care at the nearest hospital emergency room, as with any other medical emergency.

Aside from the judiciary, what else can be done? In a state like Missouri, where only 28.9 percent of statewide legislators are women, many will turn to grassroots organizing. "What's Next?," an organization dedicated to improving abortion access in Missouri, has advocated for Know-Your-Rights Trainings and other local initiatives. In a 2024 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, over 35 percent of rural women reported they wouldn't know where to go or where to find abortion information. This post by Rooney Debutts details other statewide legislative efforts to improve abortion access. 

One thing is clear: The fight for abortion access in rural Missouri is far from over. 

Understanding rural access to justice requires understanding historical economic injustice

Understanding rural access to justice issues in the rural South can be a bit complicated. As I outlined back in February, many places in the rural South have withstood the complete collapse of democracy in their communities. For the first half of the twentieth century, communities of color in these states had to reckon with a world where every lever of power, including the media, was captured by white supremacist interests. The people affected were denied access to anything that could have reasonably built wealth, their ability to own property was restricted, and they were limited in what educational or economic opportunities they could pursue. The scars of this past can be seen in high poverty rates and other statistics of despair across the region. Understanding this history is important to understanding the difficulties accessing justice in these communities and why it's important to fight for it. 

As with my last post, I am going to focus on my home, Eastern North Carolina. And I am not just going to look at my home county, I am going to look at the broader region. North Carolina has 11 counties that exist in a state of "persistent poverty"

Persistent Poverty Counties in North Carolina
Source: North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management

(as defined by the federal government) and all of them are rural counties in the eastern part of the state. Eastern North Carolina is also home to large Black and Indigenous populations. In fact, as of the 2020 Census, North Carolina has the highest concentration of Indigenous people east of the Mississippi River. 

Eastern North Carolina was the economic and political powerhouse in the state's early history. From the American Revolution until the 1910 Census, Wilmington was almost consistently the state's largest city. The only exception was the 1820 Census, where it was temporarily replaced by fellow Eastern North Carolina city (and the state's first capital), New Bern. This growth was fueled by agriculture and the shipment of goods out of ports along the coast. With economic success came political power. One of the leading perpetrators of the Wilmington coup in 1898 and one of the leading architects of what would become Jim Crow in North Carolina, Furnifold Simmons was from New Bern. Simmons was rewarded for his efforts in ushering in white supremacist rule with a United States Senate seat, from which he ran a political machine that almost single handedly selected the state's elected leadership. Simmons served in the Senate from 1901 - 1931 and is still the longest-serving United States Senator in the state's history. 

Poverty rates in North Carolina
Source: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. 

The region's economic and political prosperity was enjoyed only by a select few. A lot of people in Eastern North Carolina have long existed in deep, multigenerational poverty. For the first half of the twentieth century, Jim Crow and white supremacy reigned supreme in North Carolina. Blacks and Indigenous people were systemically excluded from many economic and educational opportunities and were often forced to work as underpaid farm labor. These decisions by the political leaders of Eastern North Carolina have had disastrous long-term impacts on the region. The decline of agriculture in the state was most acutely felt in Eastern North Carolina and its importance to the state's economy has long been supplanted by emergence of the banking industry in Charlotte and the education and tech industries in the Raleigh-Durham area. Because of poverty and spatial isolation, many people in the region are still denied access to economic and educational opportunities. The legacy of Jim Crow lives on. 

This history shapes what access to justice means and what it looks like in Eastern North Carolina. The economic subjugation of entire groups of people impacts their access to institutions of power.

Addressing the rural lawyer shortage has never been more important

If you're like me, you're probably still pouring data and trying to make sense of the results of Tuesday's Presidential election. You're also probably wondering what comes next and how we can be prepared for the next Trump Administration. How can we ensure that the most vulnerable populations are prepared to weather the next four years? How can we ensure that they have access to justice? For the last decade, I have written and studied the rural lawyer shortage. I have been excited to see the issue gain more attention over the last few years, and I am hopeful that this momentum can carry forward into the next Administration. 

Because our most vulnerable populations are going to need it. 

It is a commonly cited statistic that rural America is home to 20% of the country's people and 2% of its lawyers. As I wrote in this space five years ago, many rural spaces are also home to deeply embedded poverty and violent crime. As I also noted, the media tends to ignore the actual problems facing rural communities, so these issues are not given much attention. Indeed, I'm sure the mainstream media will pick up on increased Trump support in rural spaces, which will only serve to increase the anti-rural rhetoric that is endemic in our mainstream discourse. But the low-income and vulnerable populations in these spaces deserve a voice and a defense against what is to come. 

At a base level, the Trump Administration promised mass deportations, and a hallmark promise of his first campaign was "The Wall," a 2,000-mile-long border wall along the United States-Mexico border. Mass deportations are going to affect many rural communities around the country. And it won't just be limited to undocumented immigrants. President-elect Trump has also indicated an interest in deporting legal immigrants. Immigrant communities across the country are at risk. Immigrants in rural communities are especially vulnerable because of the paucity of available counsel. There needs to be lawyers in those spaces to make sure targeted immigrants have access to the resources to fight these mass deportation efforts. 

Further, if President-elect Trump attempts to fulfill his promise to build "The Wall," many rural communities (including sovereign Tribal nations) will find themselves disrupted by these efforts. Many landowners may even be subject to the Trump Administration's attempts to use eminent domain to acquire their land. Tribal Nations may also find themselves again battling the Trump Administration over the Wall on their sovereign land. These disputes will require lawyers to fight back. 

It is also important to note that the first Trump Administration also waged war against civil legal aid funding. As I have written before, this is part of a broader Republican effort that dates back to Ronald Reagan's time as California's governor. Like his predecessors, Trump proposed eliminating the Legal Services Corporation, which provides civil legal aid funding to organizations around the country. The Legal Services Corporation has long recognized their role in filling the justice gap in rural communities (their 2018 budget request even cited my research into the matter). Luckily, we were able to avoid the worst during the last Trump Administration, but nothing is promised going forward. 

As I have noted previously, many legal aid organizations react to budget shortfalls by closing rural offices. This will result in rural residents being able to access help with securing protective orders against abusive spouses, keeping their homes and fighting back against negligent landlords, securing counsel in contested divorce and custody cases, and a litany of other areas where legal aid attorneys play a crucial role. The elimination of the Legal Services Corporation as a key funder will almost certainly be catastrophic for rural access to justice. 

This is just a sampling of why it is especially critical right now to fight for access to justice in rural spaces. We must continue raising awareness of these issues and fight for solutions. 

On rural and white working class identity as favored in higher education admissions? The case of J.D. Vance

Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times must have had this in the pipeline because it was published moments after Joe Biden announced he would not seek or accept the Democratic nomination for President--leaving Kamala Harris his heir apparent.  Indeed, not long after he said he would not run, Biden endorsed Harris.  The headline for Polgren's column is "If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance."  Here's the lede: 

Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “D.E.I. president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.

Polgreen goes on to make the argument that J.D. Vance, Trump's selection to be Vice President, is also a D.E.I. candidate.  Here's how the argument goes: 

Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scottish-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.

And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’.

* * * 

Vance benefited from one of the most powerful forms of affirmative action that elite universities practice to attract low-income students: need-blind admissions.

* * * 

The sort of affirmative action that helped Vance gets easily overlooked; it’s less visible than race, making it easier to ascribe the achievements of white men to merit alone.

Polgreen goes on to note Vance's slim résumé.  She points out, "This champion of forgotten America made his fortune by writing a best-selling book that portrayed the rural white community he came from as lazy and undisciplined, responsible for its poverty and misery."

Then Polgreen turns back to Harris and the comparison she makes to Vance: 

Kamala Harris and JD Vance, despite their political differences, have a few things in common... They both come from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the halls of power. And now they are both engaged in the core work of politics — translating their stories into power.

This is a provocative thesis, and Polgreen may be right about Vance:  He may well have benefitted from a variety of affirmative action although, as she points out, we know nothing of his numerical metrics, e.g, LSAT score or undergraduate GPA.  But Vance entered Yale well over a decade ago, and I"m not at all sure that any of the benefits he may have enjoyed by virtue of his background are alive and well today.  In my world, I don't see any benefit to being a working-class white in higher education admissions.  Indeed, I see a lack of understanding of the working-class white struggle in that context--and an assumption that these students are retrograde in their political values and therefore not welcome, let alone favored.  

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

Postscript:  Here, a week later, is Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post making a point similar to Polgreen's on identity politics and, one might say, what's good for the goose is good for the gander: 

Harris’s main qualification, at [the point when she was picked to be Biden's Vice Presidential running mate], was that she was easily the safest choice. Absent her identity, it’s hard to imagine she would have been anywhere near Biden’s top choice.

But you know what? You could say the same for almost every vice-presidential pick in recent memory. Would JD Vance be on Donald Trump’s ticket if he weren’t a rural White guy from Ohio? Was Sarah Palin chosen for her vast policy experience? Would Barack Obama have chosen Biden if he hadn’t felt he needed a validator for White working-class voters?

Further postscript:  On August 2, the New York Times Matter of Opinions titled its episode, "‘Mountain Dew and Racism’: Identity Enters the Election."  The first few comments, which I found disjointed, follow:

Carlos Lozada:  Wait, we’re going to talk about identity politics in this campaign and not talk about —

Lydia Polgreen:  Childless cat ladies? 

Carlos Lozada:  — JD Vance and women and parents?

* * * 

Lydia Polgreen:  Well, surprise, surprise. It didn’t take long for Kamala Harris’s identity to be politicized now that she’s running for president. Just this week, Trump questioned her racial identity at a Black journalist conference, insisting that she wasn’t really Black.

Archived Recording from Black journalist conference: 

Trump:  I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black? 

Interviewer:  She has always identified as a Black woman.  She went to a historically Black college.

Trump:  I respect either one. But she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way. And then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she went she became a Black person.

Interviewer:  Just to be clear, sir. Do you believe that she is — 

Trump: And I think somebody should look into that, too...

Lydia Polgreen:  And at the same time, race and gender seem to be animating Harris supporters. Have either of you guys seen merch for White Dudes for Harris? Have you stocked up? Or Carlos, maybe the Latinos for Harris is more your speed?

Here's more on the reference to Mountain Dew--specifically on J.D. Vance's assertion that Mountain Dew is considered racist by the woke left. 

On the rural-urban divide in food insecurity and the role of federal aid

That is not the primary point of Annie Gowen's Washington Post story out of Elk City, Oklahoma, population 12,000, but it is a point that ultimately gets made in the story headlined, "A mom struggles to feed her kids after GOP states reject federal funds."   One of the consequences of Oklahoma's decision to turn away federal food aid is a burgeoning reliance on the local food pantry.  Here's that part of the story, which explicitly highlights rural disadavntage: 

Inside the Elk City Help Inc. Food Resource Center, volunteers assemble grocery carts full of U.S. Department of Agriculture-branded peas, applesauce and pork patties as well as donated items for residents who meet income guidelines. On Fridays, Executive Director Meghan Palmer puts out a call on Facebook that they’ll be offering perishable leftovers for anyone in town. The hopeful begin arriving two hours early.

There is a growing number of families among the 1,900 people Palmer feeds every month — a distressing though not surprising development given the city’s poverty rate of 26 percent, more than double the national average. Donations fund the center’s $98,000 annual budget. She’s tried for federal grants in the past, but those often require a recipient to be located near a larger city to capitalize on existing infrastructure and maximize impact.

Here's a direct quote from Palmer: 

One of the biggest issues we have is that all of the organizations and programs are tailored for larger cities and larger communities.  In rural America, we often get forgotten. It’s really powerful and extremely frustrating.

* * *  

We were pretty beside ourselves.  The ball has been dropped for Oklahomans. We’re constantly on the bottom — in mental health, poverty, food insecurity, education. It was just another slap in our face.

The story continues: 

The town’s rural location hampers its ability to respond to needy residents in other ways, too. In the eastern part of the state, two Native American tribes — the Cherokee and the Chickasaw — are administering the summer card program on their own and reaching 250,000 children, according to federal officials.

The tribes, nonprofits and local school districts expanded the spots where kids can get free meals or pick up a sack lunch. Yet a large swath of Oklahoma remains unserved. The closest location to Elk City is 25 miles away.

Here's a post from a decade ago detailing the struggle to effectively distribute food aid in rural locales.  

Art Cullen turns his attention to rural poverty

This is from Cullen's Substack today, "Iowa's unique sort of rural poverty."  Cullen recently traveled to New Orleans and back from northern Iowa (and he did so in an electric Ford pick up truck, no less).  Here's a rumination that begins as he passed from northeast Arkansas into southeast Missouri.  

Coming from relatively prosperous Iowa, I continue to be stunned by the scenes of grinding rural poverty when you get off the freeways and revisit Hwy. 61 or its cousins.

Drive the edge of gorgeous Mark Twain National Forest enroute from Jonesboro, Ark., to the Gateway to the Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, Mo., where the downtown is dead empty on a Saturday afternoon but for an open sports bar with no customers. A sign on the bar proclaims it is doing what it can to save the downtown.

The action is out on the highway in a town of 16,000 whose population steadily declined since 1980, set in the prettiest hills you could behold.

Shacks line the road in Arkansas, Black and White folks. You see the same in South Dakota off Interstate 90 (substitute Native American for Black), or in eastern Colorado, or in a Kansas cowtown time and progress passed by.

You get back to Iowa where the farmsteads look better, the dirt blacker, the machinery shinier. Yet the rust sets in here, too.

Nationally, the rural poverty rate is about 15% compared to an urban rate of about 11%. Those statistics do not reflect the extremes you see in the little burgs waylaid by the freeways.

Cullen goes on to offer further comparisons of that Arkansas/Missouri area to northwest Iowa, where he lives,  The entire post is well worth a read, not least for its discussion of the significance of immigration and race--and, of course, what freeways have done to downtowns, including those like Poplar Bluff. 

Places where you can get a home for $150K in California are all rural, remote

Entering Trona from the Southwest
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024 (February)

The Los Angeles Times published a story last week on 10 California housing markets where the median home price is $150K or less.  The one that jumped out at me was Trona, California, in the Searles Valley, which I recently passed through en route to Death Valley National Park.  

Southwest of Trona, near
Searles Valley industrial
infrastructure
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

According to wikipedia, Trona is a town of 1900 residents in San Bernardino County.  Adjacent to it is a census-designated place also called Trona, in Inyo Couty, with a population of 18 and an economy centered on marijuana cultivation.   

The affordability ratio in places like Trona is noteworthy, as journalist Terry Castleman explains: 

The ratio of median home prices to household income is less than 2 to 1, compared to nearly 10 to 1 in the rest of the state.  

Trona, California 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

In the Searles Valley, the median household income was $54,000 in 2022, well below the statewide average of $92,000, according to census data. The poverty rate, however, was nearly 20%, far exceeding California’s 12% overall rate.

Here's what Castleman wrote about recent housing market trends there:

Sonney Berri, a real estate agent in Trona, has seen an uptick in prices since the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend he attributes to homeowners who previously lived close to city centers and sold their homes to buy properties in this unincorporated community in San Bernardino County.

Trona Senior Center
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Castleman also writes of the town's longer-term history: 

Old Guesthouse Museum, (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Trona, a “desolate area that was very much thriving back in the ’50s and ’60s,” was littered with abandoned homes after plants closed decades ago, said Berri, 49. Now, “people are fixing them up and making the community better,” he said.

Trona’s heyday was in the early 1900s, when it was a company town, established in 1914 and operated by the American Trona Corp. Early on, a central building housed many workers and all the town’s businesses, including a “pool hall, a barber shop, post office, library, grocery and department store,” according to the Searles Valley Historical Society.

Former dollar store is now
the Trona Food Bank
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

The story features some rich quotes from residents, like that of 80-year-old Ann Epperly, who said she likes being able to "ride horses all over town."  

It also explains how Trona's star waned as its industrial importance lagged and as Ridgecrest, 25 miles away, grew.  

Ridgecrest is now home to the closest Walmart.  I noticed that even a dollar store had closed--and been reappropriated as the Trona Food Bank.  The former pharmacy was boarded up, as was a relatively new looking Shell station.  

On the other hand, the town boasted a spiffy new, but spartan, branch of the San Bernardino County Library.   The Senior Center looks robust; boxes of produce were stacked outside it when I passed through on a Saturday morning, when the center was closed.  San Bernardino County offices, including a court, were just a street or two off Highway 178, as was the U.S. post office.  

Here's what Castleman reports about the eight other California towns where median home values are in the $150K range:

Some of the state’s lowest median home values — as low as $114,000 —are located near the Oregon border, in the towns of Dorris, Macdoel and Tulelake. Each town is home to less than 1,000 people and set amid agricultural fields.

Herlong, located along the border with Nevada, 90 miles north of Lake Tahoe, is another town with a low median home value. It’s an army town named after a World War II-era captain and home to a military storage facility.

San Bernardino County Library, Trona Branch

In Southern California, five towns round out the group of nine: Boron, Yermo, Hinkley, Johannesburg and Trona. Surrounded by desert, most were built up around the mining industry and all have lost population in recent decades.

Sign near Mohave
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024 (February)

The town of Boron is named for the element found in borax, and Hinkley is known for a groundwater contamination lawsuit that inspired the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

I look forward to opportunities to visit some of these other remote places with affordable housing.  I've been close to Johannesburg while en route to Trona and Death Valley.   And I've passed through Dorris and Macdoel when traveling between Weed on Interstate 5 in far northern California and the small city of Klamath Falls, Oregon.  Dorris is home of the Cedar Point Nursery, a strawberry nursery that was the origin of the 2021 U.S. Supreme Court case, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid.  I've also driven through Tulelake, population just under 1,000, in the same region.  

According to wikipedia, Dorris, population 939, is home to 364 households and 414 housing units, of whom 248 are owner-occupied and 116 are renter-occupied.  Macdoel, population 86, has 43 housing units of whom 18 are owner-occupied and 23 are renter occupied.  The vacancy rate is 0%.   

Orick: the gatekeeper and poacher of the redwoods

Every year, expensive cuts of redwood are used to make trinkets, furniture, luxury car consoles, and other goods. A significant portion of this costly timber used to make these items is poached from the Redwood National and State Parks in California. Much of it comes from in and around a town named Orick. 

Orick sits at the base of the Redwood National Park in Humboldt County, California. Once a place with a booming timber industry, it now has a high poverty rate, widespread drug use, and a dwindling population. Once home to 3,000 people, its population is now estimated to be just 300. 

Orick's undiversified economy is surprisingly supported by a lucrative underground tree poaching economy. Many Orick residents have turned to illegally harvesting redwood burls from their neighboring protected lands. Burls are the bumpy growths on redwood trees that form following trauma such as lightning, fire, and fungal infections. When injured, redwoods direct their nutrients and energy into healing this trauma, which results in the burls. The burls thus contain a lot of genetic material, making it likely for a tree to sprout from the rough bump. Cutting a burl does irreparable harm, weakening the foundation of the tree and making it susceptible to disease. More consequentially, it lessens the chance for the tree to reproduce. 

Tree poaching in Orick used to involve only dead redwood logs. The regular theft of redwoods began only about fifteen years ago. In 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on authorities' concerns that poachers would begin chopping down live trees as the number of dead logs decreased, and this is exactly what happened. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that one in ten trees cut in national forests is poached, and the Redwood Park rangers are calling the poaching a "crisis." Investigators have discovered chunks of illegal burlwood along the 101 Highway from Eureka to Crescent City. 

Poachers are primarily motivated by money. These chunks of wavy burl hold significant financial value and a single slab of redwood can fetch a couple thousands of dollars. Poachers can easily drop their fresh loots off to local buyers in the area who then use the wood to make an array of luxury items. Burls are smoother and easier to carve making them ideal for sculptures and furniture. 

Poachers often work in teams and sneak into the park during the middle of the night. To lessen their chances of being caught, rainier weather is preferred during these operations. Poachers use chainsaws to cut into the trees and then haul away large chunks of redwood. From time to time, poachers are caught and charged. They are often fined, banned from the park, and ordered to complete community service (Read about one Orick poacher's sentence here.) These sentences, however, are sometimes not enough to stop poachers from coming back. 

With few economic prospects left in Orick, burl poaching has been a quick way for residents to make money. Orick had reached its peak as a logging town after World War II. During that time Orick had four sawmills, unionized timber jobs, and was a bustling town with bars, restaurants, and shops. This was also the period when many redwoods were logged––two million acres of coastal redwood were diminished to 300,000 acres. By the 1960s, the environmental impact of the logging industry was clear. In an effort to protect the remaining redwoods, environmentalists pushed for action, and in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill creating the Redwood National Park. 

Timber companies blamed environmentalists for their downfall and the effects of deindustrialization that ensued. Officials told the town that while the timber industry was collapsing, tourism to the area would boom. But this did not happen. Lyndsie Bourgon, author of Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods, told NPR:

Orick finds itself ensnared in a vicious circle: its reputation for drugs and unsightly poverty deters anyone who might want to invest in making it a permanent home or a place where tourists might want to stay.

In her book, Bourgon argues that tree poaching is the product of desperation: people with a deep-rooted attachment to Orick are left with limited options. One poacher likened himself to Robin Hood, telling Bourgon, "Robin Hood was just taking care of his and his own." 

Read more about Orick here and timber poaching in California's national parks here.