Who’s fighting whom? Rural-urban resource competition as misdirection

When I first read Professor Pruitt's 2014 book chapter on the rural lawscape, my gut reaction was defensive. I learned that rural areas have fewer courts, longer police response times, and less access to legal services than urban areas. The obvious solution would be to invest more money in these areas so that they have real access to justice. But then came my instinctive urban response: who is going to fund this? The taxes from urban spaces? Why should cities subsidize rural services?

I sat with that reaction for a while. It felt spiteful, and after some time, I realized I'd asked the wrong question.

The zero-sum framing

Pruitt's chapter, “The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space,” talks about the “mutual constitutivity” of law and rural space. Rural areas have less law because their material characteristics (low population density, distance, sparse built environment) make legal infrastructure expensive to maintain. That sparse legal presence then shapes rural culture, fostering self-reliance and skepticism toward the state.

Photo Credit: Jay Walljasper (2019)

The policy implication seems obvious: if rural residents want more legal infrastructure, they need more funding. And state funding is finite, and largely comes from the taxes of wage-earners in the city. So rural gains mean urban losses, right?

This framing positions rural and urban communities as competitors. It shows up in fights over federal appropriations, in resentment about which communities receive disaster relief, and in arguments about whether “real America” deserves more than coastal cities.

Prior posts on this blog have explored related dynamics. One post on California redistricting quoted a rural rice and walnut farmer: “People in the cities don’t have a clue what it takes to survive out here. I don’t think people that were born and raised in the cities can represent us to the same extent.” This frames the issue as the big-city bureaucrats thinking they know better than the rural folk with their actual lived experiences.

Another post on the Secure Rural Schools Act documented how a rural school superintendent made fourteen trips to Washington over three years to secure funding that Congress acknowledged had bipartisan support but still allowed to lapse. The funding was described as “budget dust” relative to federal spending. If rural needs are so uncontroversial and so cheap, why did it take three years and fourteen flights to get the money allocated?

The actual budget

To help me put all this in perspective, I considered the scale of American federal spending. The FY2025 defense budget request was $849.8 billion. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had access to $28.7 billion in 2025. Customs and Border Protection’s budget was more than $19 billion for that year.

Meanwhile, the Legal Services Corporation asked for only $1.797 billion in 2025, while facing the threat of a proposed 46% budget cut. The LSC distributes funding for civil legal aid to low-income Americans in both rural and urban areas.

Photo Credit: Mina Corpuz (2026)

The access-to-justice gap that the rural lawscape chapter documents is not expensive to address relative to other federal priorities. The entire LSC budget is less than 0.2% of defense spending. Meaningful investment in rural legal infrastructure would cost a rounding error on military appropriations.

This pattern holds across federal spending. In FY2023, 62% of the federal discretionary budget went to militarized programs: war, weapons, law enforcement, incarceration, detention, and deportation. Less than $2 out of every $5 in federal discretionary spending went to education, housing, childcare, disaster relief, environmental protection, or scientific research. Since 2001, the federal government has added $2 to the discretionary budget for militarism for every $1 invested in communities.

Meanwhile, wealth inequality has reached historic levels. In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle. By 2022, they had 71 times the wealth. The incomes of rural men have stagnated for 50 years, while the top 1% saw their incomes increase by 229% between 1979 and 2019. Rural and urban working people have both lost ground to the same forces.

The federal government has the money to invest in rural communities. It simply chooses to fund violence. The scarcity that pits rural against urban is not a fact of nature. It is a policy choice.

The shared problem

Both rural and urban poor face access-to-justice gaps. Rural residents drive hours to reach a courthouse. Urban residents wait months for overburdened public defenders. The material conditions differ, but the underlying problem is the same: inadequate funding for legal infrastructure serving ordinary people.

There is some federal recognition of the specific problems that rural Americans face. The Violence Against Women Act identifies domestic violence in rural areas as a focus for discretionary spending. The Crime Control Act sets aside funds specifically for rural drug enforcement.

But legislative recognition of rural disadvantage does not guarantee meaningful investment. A post on the rural health fund noted that the $50 billion rural health fund in the recent reconciliation bill came alongside $137 billion in projected Medicaid cuts to rural areas over ten years. This is a gesture toward rural needs accompanied by a policy that actively undermines them.

The political function of the divide

When rural and urban residents see each other as competitors for limited resources, they do not build coalitions around shared interests in healthcare, legal access, housing, or economic security. The “why should my taxes go there” instinct, which I initially felt, plays into a framework where ordinary people fight over crumbs, instead of coming together to improve their material conditions.

Photo Credit: Jacob Migdall (2015)

A post challenging the Ezra Klein Show’s framing of rural-urban tension pointed out that rural voters alone lack the numbers to determine national elections. Blaming a “rural coalition” for federal policy obscures the urban voters who supported the same candidates and the structural factors that shape resource allocation. The framing is, as the post puts it, “inflammatory and therefore unhelpful. Of course, it is also inaccurate.”

Rural-urban resentment prevents coalition-building. When a rancher in Modoc County and an unhoused person in Sacramento see each other as competitors, rather than people with shared interests in functional public services, neither builds power.

What is the baseline?

I believe everyone in the United States should have access to a viable, just legal system regardless of where they live. That belief does not require me to think rural and urban interests are identical. It requires me to think they are not fundamentally opposed.

The money exists. The obstacle is political priority. Rural-urban competition is a distraction from the actual allocation choices being made.

Congress (finally) renews Secure Rural Schools Act, through 2027

Congress voted overwhelmingly yesterday to renew the Secure Rural Schools Act.  Here's an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times coverage, by Hailey Branson-Potts, which leads with a bit historical perspective on rural schools lobbying efforts for the funding over the past few years:  

In February 2023, Jaime Green, the superintendent of a tiny school district in the mountains of Northern California, flew to Washington, D.C., with an urgent appeal.

The Secure Rural Schools Act, a long-standing financial aid program for schools like his in forested counties, was about to lapse, putting thousands of districts at risk of losing significant chunks of their budgets. The law had originated 25 years ago as a temporary fix for rural counties that were losing tax revenue from reduced timber harvesting on public lands.

Green, whose Trinity Alps Unified School District serves about 650 students in the struggling logging town of Weaverville, bounded through Capitol Hill with a small group of Northern California educators, pleading with anyone who would listen: Please renew the program.

They were assured, over and over, that it had bipartisan support, wasn’t much money in the grand scheme of things and almost certainly would be renewed.

But because Congress could not agree on how to fund the program, it took nearly three years — and a lapse in funding — for the Secure Rural Schools Act to be revived, at least temporarily.

On Tuesday, the U.S. House overwhelmingly voted to extend the program through 2027 and to provide retroactive payments to districts that lost funding while it was lapsed.

The vote was 399 to 5, with all nay votes cast by Republicans. The bill, approved unanimously by the Senate in June, now awaits President Trump’s signature.

“We’ve got Republicans and Democrats holding hands, passing this freaking bill, finally,” Green said. “We stayed positive. The option to quit was, what, layoffs and kids not getting educated? We kept telling them the same story, and they kept listening.”

Green, who until that 2023 trip had never traveled east of Texas, wound up flying to Washington 14 times. He was in the House audience Tuesday as the bill was passed.

In an interview Tuesday, Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who represents a vast swath of Northern California and helped lead the push for reauthorization, said Congress never should have let the program lapse in the first place.

I don't agree with LaMalfa on many issues, but on this one he is absolutely correct.  

The five congresspersons who voted against the Act were: 

• Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ)
• Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ)
• Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL)
• Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)
• Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC)

Here is an Ed Source story about the passage of the law, and here's an Oregon Public Broadcasting story focused on the significance of this funding to many counties in the Pacific Northwest.  CalMatters covered it here.  An announcement by New Mexico Congressman Gabe Vasquez, who says it means $9 million for his state's rural schools, is here. 

Finally, here is a February 2023 post based on Branson-Potts' previous story about California rural school administrators lobbying in Washington, D.C., for the Secure Rural Schools Act.   The term used there for the pittance represented by this spending--at least from the perspective of all federal spending: "budget dust."  

Maine Law Review Call for Papers. Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities

The Maine Law Review is seeking article proposals for our topical issue: Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities.  This issue will be published in spring 2026 as Volume 78.2 of our legal journal.

Abstracts of 300-500 words will be reviewed on a rolling basis and should be submitted no later than October 1, 2025, at 5:00 PM.  All submission should be sent to mlreditor@maine.edu.

Rural communities across the United States face unique legal challenges that often differ from those in urban and suburban settings.  Issues such as access to justice, scarcity of adequate legal counsel, limitations due to aging infrastructure, and the impact of shifting industries and demographics shape the practice of law in rural America.  Maine is the second most rural state in the country with 62% of its population living in rural areas. However, most of the legal providers are located in the more urban, southern portion of the state.  Rural communities outside of Maine face similar challenges.  

This volume is meant to speak about the challenges and potential opportunities rural communities across the nation face, and contribute to a broader conversation about how the law and policy can better serve rural America. 

Articles published in this upcoming volume of the Maine Law Review have the opportunity to contribute to an evolving area of law and to provide practical guidance and commentary on a pressing issue many rural communities across the nation are facing. Potential article topics could include but are not limited to: 

• Access to legal services in remote communities.
• The rise of virtual court hearings and tele-lawyering, and their impact on legal services.
• Infrastructure challenges in rural communities including broadband, utilities, etc., and legal solutions to them/the role of attorneys in rural economic development. 
• Unique issues to rural communities in areas of interest like family law, criminal law, property law, or impacts to rural economies or heritage industries.
• Property issues including zoning ordinances, land use regulation (farming, fishing, forestry, cannabis, etc.), or the impact of pollution/climate change on economic revitalization.
• The impact of federal funding priorities and the potential disproportionate impact on health or public services. 
• Recruitment, retention, burnout, and retirement of attorneys in rural communities.  

 The editors encourage creative and diverse viewpoints, and encourage interested authors to submit proposals on legal topics of interest that impact rural communities. 

Bridging the attitude gap

During my first year of college, I was shocked to hear one of my friends had never seen a cow in the flesh until she came to UC Davis. It was undeniable that she was a city girl, born and raised. Although Davis is not a large urban area, she nevertheless enrolled to attend UC Davis because she was attracted to the small college-town vibe.

As for me, the first time I saw a cow was when I was in kindergarten. The school had brought in cows so the students could learn more about livestock. Cows, cowboy boots, and tractors were normal, everyday sightings for me. I grew up in an agricultural town, which is best described as a rural-adjacent, suburban town. Although my hometown was not a remote rural town, I grew up with a positive attitude toward rural places. Specifically, I appreciated the labor that went into growing the produce I found on my table.

However, not everyone shares this positive attitude toward rural areas. A study from 2018 stated that 53% of urban residents do not believe rural people share the same values as them. Meanwhile 58% of rural residents do not believe urbanites share their values. Many scholars have commented on this urbanormativity phenomenon. For example, in Fulkerson and Thomas’s book, Urbanormativity: Reality, Representation, and Everyday Life, the authors discuss the perspective of urbanites toward rural residents:

[T]he residents of the swampy marsh of colonial North Carolina were widely believed to consume mud in order to survive, since farming was nearly impossible. The people of this “wasted” land were seen as sickly, stupid, lazy, and unproductive. Why else would people be content to stay in such a foreboding place?

Although cities may be an economic hub for wealth and job opportunities, urban and rural places have an undeniable link. With rural hospitals closing, many rural residents depend on urban centers to provide access to specialized medical treatment. On the other hand, urban places also rely on rural resources. A prime example is Los Angeles’ need for water from rural places:

A July 2024 report from the department found that climate change could threaten to shrink water supplies in the State Water Project — a water storage and delivery system that stretches from the western foothills of the Sierra to Riverside County — by nearly one-fourth in the next 20 years, prompting officials to call for bolstering the project’s system of reservoirs, pumps and aqueducts for the state’s future climate.

So, an important question presents itself: how can we bridge the attitude gap between urban and rural residents? Although I love to see every urban school bring livestock on campus, it is an unlikely prospect. However, urban schools can provide more educational opportunities to talk to students and increase awareness about rural places. For example, other than providing food, schools can discuss how rural areas generate energy that powers many urban cities. Hopefully, for these students, the first time they see livestock is not well into adulthood.

For more information on urbanormativity, see Coronavirus in rural America (Part LV): Urbanormativity in policy making and Metro centricity in media attitudes about the Newton County hog CAFO.

Going beyond the CALL for rural foster youth

In previous posts, I have addressed the structural barriers to adeqquate rural foster care systems, singling out the shortcomings of generalized child welfare reforms for rural communities and acknowledging the value of previous governmental efforts at rural specific foster care reform. This post turns to the issue of what institutions can do today to prop up these ailing systems with rural children in mind?

An online seach fo current rural child welfare reforms first brought me to "the CALL," which stands for "Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime."

In 2007, Arkansan churchgoers formed the CALL after recognizing the steep barriers to family foster placements, for both the state and potential foster parents. The CALL leverages the pulpit in 45 of Arkansas’s 75 counties to encourage domestic foster adoption, train foster-parents-to-be, and operate offices for county foster care needs. They act as an intermediary between the State and the foster families to break down the bureaucratic, informational, and resource barriers of the foster system.

Between 2007 and 2018, the CALL claims it trained “half of new foster families in [Arkansas] and that families it has trained cared for more than 10,000 children and provided permanent homes for 800.” By all accounts, this is an amazing effort assumed on behalf of the State and Arkansan foster youth.

But this begs the question: should a volunteer group have to shoulder this immense burden?

Moreover, are there reforms that can be established today to set rural child welfare on track? This concern has already been addressed on the blog, from a variety of angles, here, here, and here. 

The unfortunate reality is that most social work programs, including child welfare, continue to be situated in urban areas and social work training focuses on urban issues, which is a chief concern highlighted by social work scholars Joanne Riebschleger, Debra Norris, Barbara Pierce, Debora Pond, and Cristy Cummings in their 2015 article "Preparing Social Work Students for Rural Child Welfare Practice: Emerging Curriculum Competencies." 

Riebschleger et. al. pave a path for not only acquiring but retaining competent rural child welfare workers.

First, rural issues must be infused into the social work curriculum to bring awareness to the field, its needs, and its challenges. Riebschleger et. al shape rural-specific social work education around the “three R’s,” which entail (1) dealing with increased remoteness, (2) working with lower levels of resources, and (3) putting strong emphasis on relationships.

A great deal of rural child welfare work relies on personal knowledge of the community. Riebschleger et. al. describes lack of anonymity as a tool, through proper knowledge, for effective rural child welfare work: the rural social worker can “engage in informal networks, and they can sometimes make use of informal resources and relationship skills to create resources for clients and families.”

Feasible case plans--that provide rural parents opportunities to succeed--rely on the child welfare worker’s knowledge of both the parents and the community’s resources. It is the case worker’s awareness of and reliance on the community that allow them to be effective in rural settings.

In general, Riebschleger et. al. document competencies for rural child welfare workers that confront rural issues and enable the worker to provide effective and sustainable care in rural communities.

Nevertheless, real hurdles that remain. Riebschleger et. al.’s research found child welfare workers identified professional and geographic isolation, inadequate access to formal community services, traversing dual relationships, multiple job roles, and lack of personal anonymity as major barriers to rural child welfare work. Several of Riebschleger et. al.’s suggestions confront such issues and advise structuring child welfare work around them.

Several barriers to choosing rural child welfare work persist, even for competent child welfare workers. Often, a rural child welfare worker may be the only professional trained in trauma-informed practice (tailoring interactions with an individual in recognition of their trauma and avoiding re-traumatization). They end up being relied upon in other capacities and may need to train other community professionals in this practice.

One solution Riebschleger et. al. posed was for universities to create partnerships with rural organizations and recruit potential social workers from rural areas. Students from rural areas already have an investment in the rural lifestyle and an understanding of the rural social work issues.

Educational institutions should be taking these steps by providing more curricular and clinical opportunities that center around rural issues. Broadening efforts for adequate rural social service workers generally can begin to remedy the persistent lack of services with a stable and competent work force.

In my next post, I hope to identify particular reforms that legal actors, including attorneys, can initiate in the interest of rural child welfare.

Rural Scholarship: Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural America

Here's the abstract from a paper by J. Tom Mueller, Kathryn McConnell, Paul Berne Burow, Katie Pofahl, Alexis A. Merdjanoff, and Justin Farrell, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences in the United States of America.  It is titled "Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural America."  

Despite considerable social scientific attention to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urbanized areas, very little research has examined its impact on rural populations. Yet rural communities—which make up tens of millions of people from diverse backgrounds in the United States—are among the nation’s most vulnerable populations and may be less resilient to the effects of such a large-scale exogenous shock. We address this critical knowledge gap with data from a new survey designed to assess the impacts of the pandemic on health-related and economic dimensions of rural well-being in the North American West. Notably, we find that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural populations have been severe, with significant negative impacts on unemployment, overall life satisfaction, mental health, and economic outlook. Further, we find that these impacts have been generally consistent across age, ethnicity, education, and sex. We discuss how these findings constitute the beginning of a much larger interdisciplinary COVID-19 research effort that integrates rural areas and pushes beyond the predominant focus on cities and nation-states.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mozingo continues: 

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

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

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

Coronavirus consequences in rural communities (Part XI): the media

As a ruralist, I found myself annoyed a few weeks ago when the New York Times ran this story about how small newspapers are hurting for ad dollars as a consequence of businesses shuttering to comply with self-quarantine and "shelter in place" orders.  My annoyance stemmed from the story's metrocentric focus, mostly on alternative weeklies in places like St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Chattanooga.

I thus found Erik Wemple's piece in the Washington Post more appropriate.  Wemple writes about the Storm Lake Times, in Buena Vista County, Iowa.  The paper, which the headline characterizes as "storied," is certainly that--not least because its editor, Art Cullen, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing a few years ago.  Here's the lede for Wemple's story:

Buena Vista County, Iowa, has yet to log a positive coronavirus case. The media economy associated with the pandemic, however, has arrived. “Advertising has disappeared, so we will lose money in March and it was tough enough before this,” says 62-year-old Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, a twice-weekly community newspaper covering Buena Vista and parts of neighboring counties in the northwestern corner of Iowa. 

* * *  

Pulitzers reward fine work; they don’t change business models. Even before the coronavirus hit the Storm Lake Times, the newspaper was fighting the same impoverishing forces that have gutted local news outlets across the country. Ads on Facebook and Google, noted Cullen in an interview last year, had gobbled up a good bit of his revenue. “Small-town businesses discovered Facebook or Google and there goes that 20-buck ad you were living on,” he said. “And we live on $20 ads. That’s how we make a living — the scraps that fall off the table.”

By the way, the paper has a GoFundMe page.  I donated.

If this is what's happening to the Storm Lake Times, imagine how other rural and small town newspapers are faring as advertising revenue slumps.  Some earlier posts about contemporary struggles of that sector of the media market are here and here.  This background is from April Simpson for Pew's Stateline last fall.

According to a recent story from the Associated Press, more than 2100 cities and towns have lost a paper in the past decade and a half.  That recent AP story mentions of rural Nevada, where Battle Born Media "is scaling back or ceasing publication of six rural weekly newspapers."  Here's a story by the Las Vegas, Nevada newspaper about that turn of events.  The AP story also discusses what's happening at the Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Massachusetts, population 43,000, but/and part of the greater Boston metro area.  That paper has just a dozen newsroom employees left, as falling ad revenue has forced it to lay off the political reporter, as well as various business-side staff.  Here's a story out of Montana about the rural newspaper crisis, this one by the Billings Gazette.

I'm looking at the latest issue of my hometown newspaper, the Newton County Times, dated April 1, 2020. Ads do not seem sharply down over past weeks, but shelter-in-place instructions are relatively new to Arkansas.  Also, much of the advertising seems to be placed by non-local businesses, such as those selling steel buildings, walk-in showers, and dental insurance.  There are also, predictably, ads for the only pharmacy in town, a monument (tombstone) company, the local internet provider--oh, and some senior living facilities in neighboring counties.  Sadly, the demand for those products is staying constant, if not rising.  There's an ad for a local tow truck operator and one for an autobody shop. Then there are the classifieds--and the ads encouraging people to place classifieds, including in the larger daily paper in the neighboring county, which is published by the same company as the Newton County Times. 

Also, it's good for the Newton County Times that it published an advertising heavy supplement the prior week, when it was touting Newton County as a tourism destination--somewhat ironically, as I recently wrote about here.

Postscript:  From the Brookings Institute on April 8, 2020.  From Clara Hendrickson's report:

Amid the public health crisis, many communities across the U.S. suffer from a lack of local reporting. Of the 2,485 U.S. counties that reported COVID-19 cases as of April 6th, 50% are news deserts (home to only one local newspaper or none at all). Fifty-seven percent of counties that have reported cases of COVID-19 lack a daily newspaper and 37% saw local newspapers disappear between 2004 and 2019. It is impossible to know what will not be told in the communities that have seen local newspapers disappear in recent years, but undoubtedly, important stories will go uncovered as the coronavirus spreads across the country.

Postscript:  From New Mexico Senator Tom Udall's Twitter account on the afternoon on April 8, 2020, re distress amongst New Mexico's media and his proposal for federal assistance to help alleviate it:

From The Atlantic, on the rural mental health crisis

See James Burns' short documentary here, out of Cochise County, Arizona, population 131,346 and covering an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

And here's more coverage of the rural health care crisis--in particular the closure of rural hospitals.  This is out of Appalachian Virginia, from In These Times.  The November, 2019, issue of that publication was dedicated to the "High Cost of Living Rural."  Of course, this blog features many posts over the years on rural health care issues, which you'll find under the "mental health" and "health care" tags.

A thoroughly rural judge

I have spilled quite a bit of ink over the years (as here and here) about what I call urbancentric and metronormative (or metrocentric and urbanormative) judges, so I'm happy to report here on a counter-example:  a recently confirmed federal district judge in North Dakota--in fact, the new chief justice for the district of North Dakota--who is also an active farmer.  The Grand Forks Herald reported yesterday on Judge Peter Welte: 

While he has been farming for most of his life, this fall Welte, 54, made a second lifetime commitment: He was confirmed as a federal judge.

* * *

Welte has been an attorney since 1997, when he graduated from UND Law School. After law school he worked in private practice and in the public sector before his nomination to the federal judgeship.

Throughout the past 22 years since his graduation from law school, and during the 13 post-high school years before that, Welte also has farmed, growing grain and row crops on family land near Northwood, N.D. He made clear when he was nominated that he would be committed to being a federal judge, but that agriculture would remain an important part of his life, Welte said.

Welte draws a parallel between the two endeavors: 

There’s a natural allure to the idea that farming is something that begins in the spring and ends in the fall... There’s a tangible beginning and end.

* * *

A case has a lifespan. I think that’s the parallel – farming has a set beginning and end.

Ann Bailey, the journalist responsible for this story, reports that Welte is able to continue farming by using vacation time to work on the farm during critical periods--like during the recent soybean harvest.  Northwood, population 945,  is in the same county as Grand Forks, where the judge's chambers are, so at least it's convenient as he keeps up his dual vocations.  

Small So. Cal town declares itself a second amendment "sanctuary"

That town is Needles, in the Mojave Desert area of the state's Inland Empire.  The Cal Matters report characterizes Needles as "550 miles and an entire political culture away from the state capital in Sacramento," and one theme of the story is the state's urbanormativity/metrocentricity.    The small city lies in the far eastern reaches of San Bernardino County, population 2 million (albeit with a very low population density given the 20K square miles the county covers), just across the state line from Mohave County, Arizona.  Here's an excerpt from the Cal Matters story, dateline July 15, 2019, by John Glionna:

Like many inland Californians, Needles residents say they’re held hostage by state legislators who are too liberal and want too much control over their lives. They gripe about strict gun laws they say trample their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

So [city councilman Tim] Terral fought back. He spearheaded a resolution, passed last week by the council, that declared Needles a “Second Amendment Sanctuary,” a place where both California gun owners and those visiting from out-of-state can expect lenient enforcement on Golden State’s rules governing, for example, ammunition and concealed carry permits. 

Needles Mayor Jeff Williams, a former San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputy, who himself carries a Glock 45 9 mm, is quoted:

When Sacramento passes a new law, they look to San Francisco and Los Angeles. They don’t come looking to small towns like us, and it’s time we made our opinions known. We realize changing state law is pretty far-fetched, but you’ve got to start somewhere, you’ve got to stand on principle.

I agree that urbanormativity pervades California politics, where just 2% of the population live in places that meet the US. Census Bureau's definition of rural.  Indeed, not even Needles, with a population of population 4,844, meets the Census Bureau's miserly threshold for rural. 

As for the Needles resolution,

Terral even chose wording to take a swipe at Democratic legislators in Sacramento, and in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, who have declared “sanctuary” policies limiting the involvement of state and local law enforcement in the pursuit of undocumented immigrants targeted by the Trump Administration.

The story quotes Terral: 

With the gun resolution, I purposely chose the word ‘sanctuary’ to take a stab at all the liberals.  It was a little jab in the eyes.

As for many Needles residents, they "want to make it easier for interstate travelers who pull off U.S. Interstate 40 for food and fuel to avoid a felony arrest if a traffic stop produces a loaded but legally-registered gun from outside California."  Needles has lost half of its population since the 1960s, and some believe "restrictive gun laws are driving visitors — and their money — away from town."

As for laws related to guns and ammo, the local government is not the only action.

Assemblyman Jay Obernolte, a Republican representing the largely-rural 33rd District that includes Needles, supports the town’s gun sanctuary declaration. He plans to introduce a bill in December to give more local control to rural gun owners and allow for interstate reciprocity with firearms laws.

Obernolte's chief of staff is the source of just one of the other quotes that makes this story so rich and interesting.  It's well worth a read in its entirety and I commend Glionna's reporting.

Another recent post about Needles--this one about marijuana legalization from late 2018--is here.   I guess the common philosophy of both actions in Needles is libertarianism, another explicit theme of the Cal Matters report.

Inaccurate and simplistic depictions of rural America are damaging

About a month ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, in which I criticized a piece that they chose to publish. In that piece, the author argued that our culture unduly defines rural America as "America." In making her argument, she relied on a few, quite bizarre, troupes. As I outline in my piece, she diminishes the concerns of marginalized groups in rural spaces by noting that rural America is "less racially diverse" and that issues such as gun violence, clean water and air, and infrastructure are uniquely "urban concerns."  She also scapegoats rural America for the rightward shift in the political discourse by noting that politicians can simply call Rural America, "Real America," and ignore the country's problems.  In her article, she is attempting to paint Rural America as a politically, socially, and racially homogenous entity, which is quite far from the truth.

The landscape of Rural America is rich and diverse. From the predominantly African American communities in the Black Belt to the Hispanic communities along the Mexican border to the tribal communities that dot our landscape to the French speaking communities along the New England/Canadian border, there is a lot of variety in Rural America. These communities all share unique concerns and attempts to paint them all with a broad brush does a huge disservice to the people who live there and their struggles. However, if you read this piece, you might think that the struggles of Rural America aren't important. The author after all does a fantastic job of minimizing the struggles of Rural America, which is home of the some of the deepest and more persistent poverty in the country. After all, non-metro poverty is higher than metro poverty, a difference that is even more pronounced in communities of color. Poverty in Rural America is even multigenerational with 86% of persistent poverty counties, defined as counties with a poverty rate of 20% or more for the last three Censuses, having entirely rural populations.

Many of the "urban" concerns that she notes are also very much relevant to these communities. For example, gun violence plagues many rural communities. My home county, Robeson County, North Carolina, often tops the list for violent crime in North Carolina. For people where I grew up, gun violence is a very real concern. Infrastructure is also a major concern where I grew up, mainly broadband infrastructure. We live in an age where many in Rural America lack access to adequate broadband, a major impediment to economic growth. My home community also faces issues with more traditional infrastructure, mainly Interstate 95, and the need to widen it in order to accommodate the traffic that travels between the Northeast and Florida.

Many rural communities also face issues with clean water and air. In the Midwest and South, industrial farming has helped to lead to polluted waterways. In Appalachia, the legacy of coal mining has left a polluted landscape. In other communities, the spread of fracking and the growth of the natural gas industry has led to concerns about air and water quality. The spread of gas pipelines is also creating concern for water quality in rural communities, Dakota Access Pipeline protests in rural North Dakota from 2016 is a great example of the tension that this has created.

Perhaps most troubling is her belief that focused on an idealized Rural America is focusing on Rural America. She is correct that politicians like to espouse nostalgia for "small town America." She is incorrect in her belief that it is actually is an attempt to depict people who actually live in these communities. When a politician talks about "traditional" small town values, are they talking about the people who live in an impoverished farming community in Mississippi? Or are they talking about the Rural America that has been depicted in shows like "Green Acres," "The Andy Griffith Show," or countless other TV shows and movies that offer a simplistic depiction of rural America? The answer should be obvious. When a politician talks about "small town values," they are curating a false narrative for the predominantly urban and suburban voting base that they need to appeal to in order to win an election. The "small town values" that are espoused by politicians are a simplistic creation, one that serves to further obscure the problems being faced by the small towns whose values that they are extolling. Scapegoating Rural America for the rightward shift in the political discourse is quite disingenuous.

Finally, in framing her argument, she attempts to depict the Memorial Day celebration in Voorheesville, New York, a suburb of Albany, as representative of Rural America.  Perhaps the author would benefit from visiting a rural community and seeing what is out there for herself.

"Nationalism" across the rural-urban axis

E.J. Dionne proclaimed a few days in his syndicated column that "There is much to fear about nationalism.  But liberals need to address it the right way."  In it, he discusses the current political moment (including the nationalist grip on Trumpsters--think "America First") in relation to the rural-urban divide.  He begins:

In affluent neighborhoods around Washington, New York and Los Angeles — and, for that matter, Paris, London and Berlin — it’s common to denounce nationalism, to disdain supposedly mindless, angry populists, and to praise those with an open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. Note that those involved are praising themselves.

And then he gets more specifically to the rural-urban divide, linking the current political divide that so often falls along the rural-urban axis, due to the economic woes of the former:

But those who would save liberal democracy (along with anyone who would advance a broadly progressive political outlook) need to be honest with themselves and less arrogant toward those who currently find nationalism attractive. 

Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries. 

Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening (emphasis added).

I'll leave it at that for now, for readers to consider Dionne's critique of the chattering classes.

Lancet article on distance to abortion providers spawns some urbancentric headlines

The Lancet Public Health, the prestigious medical journal, published an article yesterday about the distances women in the U.S. have to travel for abortion care, and lots of mainstream media outlets picked up the story.  What initially struck me about several stories was the focus on this fact:  1 in 5 U.S. women must travel more than 43 miles to get to an abortion provider.  This is a factoid that would have the average rural woman thinking, "no big deal," because rural residents travel distances like that for everyday activities--like getting to work.  What burdens many rural women, you see, are much greater distances.

An opening line of the Guttmacher Institute's press release about the article does acknowledge some other key data points:

Nationally, half of all women of reproductive age lived within 11 miles of the nearest abortion clinic in 2014.  However, a substantial minority of women, particularly those in rural areas, lived significantly farther away.  (emphasis added)

The article was written by three Guttmacher Institute researchers, including lead author Jonathan Bearak.  The map accompanying the article shows a big swath running north to south through the middle of America as the most vast abortion desert.

NPR's coverage did a better job of highlighting what I would say is the more salient fact regarding rural women.  Their headline was "For Many Women, the Nearest Abortion Provider is Hundreds of Miles Away." Sarah McCammon's story features a woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota who elected to drive four hours to Minneapolis for an abortion because the State of Minnesota does not impose a 72-hour waiting period like South Dakota does.

Here's another excerpt from Guttmacher's press release, which quotes Bearak:

Women and abortion clinics are both concentrated in urban areas, so it is not surprising that most women live relatively close to an abortion clinic.  However, distance may be a significant barrier to accessing abortion care for the substantial minority who live farther away, and especially for economically disadvantaged women, who make up the majority of abortion patients.

The title of The Lancet article is "Disparities and Change Over Time in Distance Needed to Travel to Access an Abortion in the U.S.:  A Spatial Analysis."  One of the "over time" findings is that between 2011 and 2014, distances to clinics remained the same in 34 states, while they increased in 7.  Needless to say, the states where the distances have increased include Wisconsin, Texas, and Alabama, all of which have passed so-called TRAP laws, Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, the constitutionality of which have been litigated in recent years.

CNN's coverage of the article featured a more appropriate headline that pleased me for its focus on the extreme distances facing some women.  The headline is "Some US women travel hundreds of miles for abortions, analysis finds."  That story included this additional information, the first line of which states what should be obvious:

"How far a woman has to travel for an abortion is a key measure of access," Bearak said. Other measures include restrictive laws and financial constraints.

To analyze how far women travel to terminate a pregnancy across the nation, the researchers began with data on the location of abortion providers and women. The information on women was based on census block groups, Bearak said: "That is the smallest publicly available geographic unit." Within states are counties, within counties are census tracts, and within tracts are block groups.

This analysis sounds very similar to what researchers did to quantify abortion availability in Texas following the different stages of implementation of House Bill 2, which was ultimately struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016. 

My extensive writing about distance, travel, and abortion access is here, here, and here, along with many posts under the "abortion" label on the Legal Ruralism blog.

Cross-posted to Feminist Legal Theory.