America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs | Hacker News Reader

America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs

theguardian.com

139 pointsdthal44 comments

Beattyville is near/in the Red River Gorge area, depending on exactly where you draw the boundaries. I've spent a lot of time nearby on climbing trips, and yes, the area is astonishingly poor. Climbers rarely get that far south of Mountain Parkway, but the whole area is in pretty rough shape.

I think one of the things that's interesting to consider about this is that there is a large stream of people coming into the area, and it isn't just climbers. The area is full of recreation opportunities. What isn't clear is how to ensure that the money works its way out into the communities. In all of the trips I've made, I've spent money in just a handful of businesses: 3 campgrounds, 1 pizza place (which also happens to be a campground), 1 other restaurant, the much loved beer trailer, and the Shell station in Slade.

It's not clear that tourism is a viable replacement for resource extraction in an area where there are established communities. Tourism, and eco-tourism specifically, is something we see pitched as a way to save undeveloped land in the developing world, but based on what I see in the Red River Gorge area, it hasn't brought much prosperity to the region as a whole. Perhaps if there isn't an established economy and population based on resource extraction it can be made to work, but the hard reality seems to be that resource extraction employs a lot more people.

I love getting outside, and the Red River Gorge area is a beautiful place to do it. I want to see the country (and the world) make a shift towards renewable energy. I work to reduce the amount of waste I generate. But when you get right down to it, there are a lot of places where the economy is based on resource extraction, and I have a hard time envisioning what the people living in those places are going to do if the brighter, greener future comes to pass.

Beattyville may be struggling because the cost of coal mining locally can't compete with the cost of coal mining in Wyoming, but making a shift towards greener energy is going to put a lot more communities in a similar situation.

I grew up in Hazard, KY. Tourism would help, but it won't fill the void left by the mining industry. There was a massive amount of money in coal. Every profession in the area ultimately led back to coal. Tourism can help some parts of the area, but honestly, I think some of these towns are just going to cease to exist.

I have to agree. I grew up in KY as well (closer to Louisville) and you don't have to go far outside of Louisville before it looks like this article. We used to do long bike rides (100/150 miles) and the abandoned towns and poor towns we would pass through was startling. It was really hard to ride out on an expensive bike into areas like that and not feel like you were enjoying the beautiful countryside while also ignoring the huge problems that were right in front of you. That is why tourism does not really work to fix these issues. It brings in a little money but not enough compared to what was there previously. Resource extraction is a dead end...it always is and I tend to agree these towns will simply cease to exist.

>> But when you get right down to it, there are a lot of places where the economy is based on resource extraction, and I have a hard time envisioning what the people living in those places are going to do if the brighter, greener future comes to pass.

There aren't going to be nearly as many people living in those places. Like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath people will move to greener pastures. We can make that transition easier or harder, but there's not much we can do to prevent it altogether and we probably shouldn't even if we could.

Rather than try to bring coal mining back to this community as a form of social subsidy - why not just institute a basic federal income?

These folks are not alone - they are just the canaries in the mine. They have literally no useful modern job skills. And while they are the first to fall to this trend, as coal miners in 21st century america, millions of jobs are soon to follow, from fast food workers, to call center employees, to a huge number of accountants, lawyers, salespeople, factory workers - jobs of all kinds.

Rather than struggle with trying to give jobs to people who have no skills, and then trap them into working at these jobs in order to sustain themselves, why not just give them a guaranteed basic income that keeps them above poverty? Is that so hard?

We're talking about a government that hasn't even been able to get its own annual budget in order for years now, remember. So a guaranteed basic income might indeed be a big lift.

> huge number of accountants, lawyers, salespeople, factory workers - jobs of all kinds.

One thing absent from your future job-losses: people in software. Not a critique, more just an interesting note.

(Paraphrased) The problem with a basic federal income is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

I've recently become a Jeep enthusiast. There's a fairly limited amount of off-road trails and rock crawling locations on the East Coast. I can only imagine that there's tons of great places to wheel given the amount of mining that happened around here. Another tourism opportunity - likely would only make a small dent, but interesting nonetheless.

I like the thought of eco-tourism as a boon but short of international destinations like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite, does it really have an economic impact? I also get the feeling that Red River Gorge is more for adventurists like yourself and less for 'eco-tourists', which might have a propensity to spend more money locally.

I would love to be proven wrong. This is a very interesting subject to me.

Arizona and Nevada are dotted with abandoned copper and silver mining towns.

Last year, I had a half-day in a place that went through a similar transition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raton,_New_Mexico

Made an impression on me. Wrote a poem about it on the train --

  Raton Station

  It’s flat
  Flatness rolls for miles around
  Mountains in the distance
  Flatness approaching the peaks

  Scenic clouds dot the sky
  Looking perhaps painted on
  The place is rather idyllic
  Except for, well, you know

  Every store is having a sale
  Of the stores still open
  If you want to lease a building
  The local Radio Shack is also town landlord

  The people are friendly enough
  7,000 of them are scraping by
  The waitress loves it here
  Despite saving money to move to Omaha

  We hitched a ride in the bed of the pickup
  To the stretch with restaurants and hotels still open
  I asked what had happened here?
  The coal mines shut down

Good stuff.

For others interested in the subject, Frontline has a great documentary about growing up in Floyd Country, Kentucky, Country Boys:

"Filmed over three years (1999-2002), "Country Boys" tracks the dramatic stories of Chris and Cody from ages 15 to 18. With the same intimate cinematic technique and sound design that distinguished "The Farmer's Wife," Sutherland's new film bears witness to the two boys' struggles to overcome the poverty and family dysfunction of their childhood in a quest for a brighter future. This film also offers unexpected insights into a forgotten corner of rural America that is at once isolated and connected, a landscape dotted with roughshod trailer homes and wired with DSL."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/view/

Ha, a good friend of mine moved his business to Raton about 15 years ago. The town we're both from is much smaller and as evidenced by his success there, less economically vibrant than even Raton.

Nice poem, but I thought the part about it being flat was strange, since there's a mountain pass into Colorado just north of town, called Raton Pass. Maybe that was symbolism?

If you're not familiar with Raton, go check it out on Google Street View. There's mountains in the distance, but not otherwise a whole lot of geography.

I did have a look at Raton and surrounding roads on Street View earlier and actually thought it looked rather pleasant.

For those interested in learning more about the erosion of the American heartland by the widespread use of prescription narcotics, particularly Oxycontin, I strongly recommend the book "Dreamland," a nonfiction text weaving together the narratives of the opiode boom in American medicine and the spread of Xalisco black tar herion cells throughout American cities that had seldom seen heroin: http://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-Epidemi...

Very readable and educational. I couldn't put it down, and it tied together a lot of disparate threads that I have noticed over the past two decades but which I was unable to connect myself.

The erosion is not just isolated to the heartland. Grew up in a suburban area and the epidemic was just as bad. Highschoolers were getting hooked at a very young age and some elderly people were selling their Oxycontin as well.

This has since changed as the laws/regulations regarding filling Oxycontin perceptions changed. Now Heroin is becoming an epidemic. Some friends in law enforcement have told me there is a big increase in high schoolers and young 20s using Heroin, which causes an increase in them becoming thieves or prostitutes (15 and 16 year olds from somewhat well off families running away from home).

There is also the film Prescription Thugs, directed by Chris Bell: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4505666/

I also recommend the 2013 documentary, Oxyana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrE1uxGd6OQ

Try any mining town in the south west - Trona comes to mind. That was a town ruled by meth, with mining as its main bread winner. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-city-addicted-to-crystal-...

Australia needs to learn this lesson. Eventually coal will be phased out significantly enough that mass mining don't be economical. In the meantime we ruin our ecology in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Mining coal in Australia in the 21st century is not lawless. It does not "ruin the ecology." It has CO2 impacts to be sure, but does not ruin the ecology.

On the plus side it provides indispensable, low-cost, electricity for poor people in Asia--people who wouldn't have electricity if not for coal.

Coal's only cheap when you don't bother to count all it's negative effects, which will predominately be borne by the poor people you're (slightly bizarrely) claiming to serve.

Coal isn't something worth celebrating, it should be phased out as quickly as possible. Every unit of coal not burned will let us burn twice as much natural gas in terms of CO2, and with far less pollution. And we have more gas than we can burn without blowing our carbon budget anyway.

Repeat after me:

No open cut coal mine has ever damaged the local ecology.

No coal mine tailings spill has ever damaged the local ecology.

Strip mining has ever damaged the local ecology.

Coal mining has never damaged water supplies.

> pursuit of the almighty dollar

Turns out, not having any of those almighty dollars ends up looking like this town - pretty bad.

Which just goes to show that mining coal at the exclusion of all other economic activity in pursuit of the almighty dollar doesn't mean you'll have any at the end.

Yes, but the town wouldn't exist at all were it not for the coal-extraction industry. I think that was the point being made.

On that note: http://www.twodollarsaday.com/

I find this kind of "in depth" news series frustrating. The problem here is not lack of coal business; it's lack of ability or motivation for these people to pull up stakes and move to a better area.

I would suggest North Dakota, or would have up until a year or two ago when the price of oil dropped drastically. The jobs up there were paying crazy wages, truck drivers pulling six figures, restaurant dish washers making $15-20/hour etc. It's a temporary boom but the fact is, that's where the jobs are, or were. Still better economy up there than in Kentucky, even now.

Thus, what's really missing from these backward areas is education. With good education, even just K-8, people will have the ability and resources to understand that they can vote with their feet and move to where the economic opportunities are. Someone with mining experience might do OK as a roughneck in west Texas, Oklahoma, or North Dakota. If you're a hard worker and have been in the mines, or driven trucks, or done back breaking work outdoors, you're going to be able to find something.

But as for people who just sit around their cabins, the classic backwoods hillbilly stereotype, addicted to opioids or other chemicals and unable to or unwilling to do something about their situation -- sorry if this sounds hard hearted but it's hard for me to dredge up a lot of sympathy. Someone who's not sitting around feeling sorry for himself and abusing drugs -- that's the one I have sympathy and respect for.

The thing is, people do. That's part of the problem. Who leaves? The most able, the most motivated. Those left behind? Less able, less motivated. Which makes it worse.

This was my own father. He came from a little west of that belt, the tobacco farms of south central Kentucky. He got up and left as soon as he could. He never even graduated high school. When I was a kid, we'd visit my grandfather's farm. I thought it was heaven - Kentucky is extraordinarily beautiful. But they didn't have electricity or running water. Not really something a five year old notices, but an adult remembers.

Incidentally, the exact same problem has happened to inner city black neighborhoods. In the pre-civil rights era, blacks simply weren't allowed to live in white neighborhoods, so the doctors, lawyers, business owners, and other talented and determined black leaders lived in the same neighborhood as the poor. Once they got the ability to live somewhere nicer, they left, leaving ghettos full of addicts, gangs, the uneducated, the disabled, basically people unable to leave.

It's really difficult for people who have grown up with the privileges of middle/upper class to comprehend what it's like to live in poverty. It's not just that you're poor. It's that you're surrounded by losers, because all the people with talent have already left. When I was a kid, I didn't know anyone wealthy, except those men my father worked for, whom he hated. I didn't know anyone well-educated, except teachers. The most successful adult I knew owned a motorcycle dealership, and not a very big one.

And as soon as I was old enough to live on my own, I left. I went to a great college and met a whole new class of people. But mostly, I was running. I got up and ran, and kept running until the stupid racist redneck bikers were long behind me. Because when you have talent and you live in crap, that's what you do.

I don't come quite from your background, but my social circle growing up overlapped with that world a bit. There's a huge gap between the bone-in poverty world and the "rest" of the US; ambition, expectations, mobility, money, interactions with authority, etc.

It's the case that able and motivated people leave, and they better themselves, and the people left behind are, sadly, less able, less motivated, less something. This accelerates the cycle. It's not just city/country (although that seems to be a big part of it): out West there is still a lot of money in industrial farming of wheat, potatoes, etc. Those communities are chugging along. It's the communities which have no industry that fail.

So I'm from the area and taught a remote CS class though teals. It isn't that easy. Most of these people don't have enough money for day to day and your idea of moving to another region requires capital. People that have never in there life had enough money to go to the dentist may find it challenging to move there entire family halfway across the country and support themselves while they get setup. Almost all the people with the means do leave what you have left are those that are already support family members or are tied to the land in some way.

So they have money for drugs but not moving?

Some people feel that they not only have the right to never move, but others should come in and help them, through aid or whatnot, for their bad decision.

you want to live in a barren waste land, that's your problem; Don't complain about it.

> So they have money for drugs but not moving?

$40 for some weed is different than the cost of gas, deposit to rent a new place, days or weeks of food while you find a new job, and stress of leaving your friends and family.

Yes, they have money for drugs but not moving.

$40 + $40 + $40 = enough.

Probably too stoned out of their minds to think that far ahead. They should move ahead with having their next 3 children instead.

>With good education, even just K-8, people will have the ability and resources to understand that they can vote with their feet and move to where the economic opportunities are.

With good education you might understand that there is a non-insignificant relocation cost that not everyone can afford.

Well, no one's saying it's easy to pick up and move. But sometimes it's just necessary.

Even if it's necessary, how do you manage to move if you have zero dollars, empty tank (or no car), constant calls from collectors (if your phone is hooked up)...

Sometimes it's not hard, but impossible.

I think the point is that whatever aid is provided should help people leave, not help them stay.

The point is, if you aren't going to do BIG, at least revive the 'new deal'. Unemployment shouldn't mean you don't have a job, it should mean you have the default job; sure that job might be underemployment and you might be underpaid relative to your skills, but you still have a job, a way of actually making the ends meet. Let's also finish the job of providing the other basic rights that a society expecting people to live in a city instead of carving their own village out of the wilderness should. Basic food, shelter, security, and health/death care.

You have to wonder then how is it that Mexico's poorer rural farmers are able to migrate over to the USA and start from scratch in a new country?

Deep family and community support system.

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