Rural America Is Losing Nursing Homes, and Small Towns Are Reeling
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Raising the money was the “easy part,” Mosbrucker says. “Staffing is going to be the hard part.” Covid-19 exacerbated an existing labor shortage in rural North Dakota, which had been losing population for decades as small farms merged and mechanization displaced workers, scattering young people to Bismarck, Fargo, Minneapolis and other cities.
Mott lost more than a third of its population between 1990 and 2020, leaving it with a median age of 49. (The median in Fargo, the state’s most populous city, is just above 31.) Reopening the nursing home will be key to stanching the flow of families out of the area, says Charlotte Aldinger, who grew up on a farm nearby and moved back from Bismarck with her family in 2012.The arc of my point is, what if that project was dialed back a bit and those monies invested in something else in the town? Something more investment-y and less expense-y?
It seems that we have plenty of money, what we're not good at is spending the right amount on the right things at the right time. Is there no way to improve that?
I suspect the bridge is more about the grid layout road system providing transport for many supplies than it is about the population of a small town near an intersection or the even smaller population of various empty fields the road passes by.
If major urban areas with nearby ports can have drawbridges, certainly rural towns can figure out how to share a one lane bridge, and then invest the savings elsewhere.
The traffic on the bridge isn't related to to the size of the closest town.
The funding for the bridge isn't neccesarily related to funding available for the town.
This is related to other national infrastructure questions that saw Federal money going toward the upkeep of failing bridges in particular states and counties that were dragging down transport reliability across the USofA.
The government builds these bridges, do you still think that means they can't cost all that much?
The point is, excess and overkill isn't an investment. It's an expense. It's a waste.
The money could be spent elsewhere. I can't imagine why that's a bad thing to do.
Need to see who paid for it. But it looks it's the route from the southwest corner of town to the state highway, the main route west. Probably well travelled.
And paid for by public funds. Nursing homes tend to be private, so completely different budgets.
I'm asking if sometimes (too often?) public money is misspent on things when they would be better invested on other things. Bridges aren't cheap. While transportation is important, is that bridge a sign of excess?
Case in point would be a bridge with enough traffic to warrant more than one lane going through a small town. If people from the entire region use that bridge, it's bringing a fair bit of economic activity to the town, and the town probably didn't pay for it on their own (state and federal funds earmarked for transit infrastructure may well have payed for the whole thing).
Waste is waste.
Areas that are short on revenue...and need to *invest* in the future...
Well, I trust you can see where is is going.