Is There Opportunity In The Lack Of Opportunity?

Depressed towns as new frontiers

I saw a very interesting post on Substack that I’m just going to reproduce in full, from someone who appears to be a conservative Catholic living in a small rural town in upstate New York:

Few understand this feeling, but it gets me high.

Empty, rainy, gloomy streets. Every building is decrepit, and basically everyone is elderly. No one’s going to work even though it’s a non-holiday weekday. You go to Stewarts, buy an Eggwich, and walk around all day, unemployed.

There are no cars on the road. No one is coming to visit here today. It’s absolutely pissing with rain — chilly, miserable, dark even at noon. There’s no reason to be here. You haven’t seen a person your own age in months.

You are free from the harsh sorrows of the wide world. There’s no “grind” here. No “who’s who.” No one cares — it’s all dying, falling apart, silent, poor, crumbling.

But boy, that Eggwich tastes good. The Stewart’s lights glow in the fog. The empty library beckons you in; you slink down in some dark corner of it, hearing the ventilation fans kick on, reading some obscure local history book that no one has checked out since 1982.

If you stay here long enough, you might be the Mayor. Or you might drink yourself to death. There’s no telling what the future holds for a young fellow who sticks around here. It’s complete freedom — maximum self-ownership. Every schema for defining what you should be doing with your life has died, failed, gone elsewhere. Every hour of your life is truly up to you.

There’s something weirdly Promethean about all this. Or is it just depressing? You ponder this question, shambling around the empty towns, eyeing the pigeons in the caved-in barns...

I’m serious, it gets me high. I can’t quit it. I love nothing more than this.

I really get this. It’s the same feeling—no shade to my hometown—that I get walking around Main Street in Flemington, New Jersey. Flemington is in vastly better shape than this, and it’s growing and building again after a slump in the 2010s. But this line—“If you stay here long enough, you might be the Mayor”—rings true. You could also (if the zoning made it easy) start a little business in one of the empty storefronts.

There’s a real insight in the idea that in small places without a strong economy, there is, paradoxically, more opportunity. The rules and the power structures are weaker, and there’s more room for an individual taking some initiative to strike out.

Maybe this is theoretical, or at least not scalable. If it were true—if the thousands of depressed towns across America were truly new frontiers, waiting for an enterprising person to show up—maybe they’d all be restored already. What can a mayor do in a place like that, anyway?

It makes me think of Parksville, New York, a slightly internet-famous old Catskills ghost town:

Or East Liverpool, Ohio:

It’s as if the end of the world already happened here. And yet there are still people, just going about their lives, who would resent such dramatic narrativizing of their experience, I suppose. Some of the gentrified, hip urban neighborhoods in major cities today were once left for dead like this: Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati comes to mind. But Parksville is basically empty and East Liverpool is about 10,000 people, down from a peak of 26,000 in 1970. In 1850, it was under 1,000. It may very well be the case that no “restoration” will ever happen in these towns that sprouted up, grew rapidly over an erstwhile industry, and then shrunk back down. They may not go anywhere. They’ll just be there, eking it out.

I guess there’s a kind of reverse bohemianism, or just plain old bohemianism, in the idea that you could just live a steady-state life in a place like this, with very little income, certainly without a career path and a 9-5 job. Or that, if you’re that Catholic conservative, you could buy and fix a home, persuade some other folks to move out and buy a home too, start some kind of school for all your kids, start a community garden, open some businesses? You can almost imagine these places beckoning a kind of urban Amish movement.