Rural Texas - Towns are dying off

McMutry's bookstore is still open in Archer City. I think McMutry was surprised that his home town survived and made out a lot better than the fictional Thalia. There is a lot of fracking around the Fort Worth basin of the Barnett formation that has kept some life in the Wichita Falls area. And the wind farms have also helped keep people employed in construction and maintenance. If they only had cattle and cotton, I think Archer City would have gone the way of Thalia. But there is a lot of surprising resilience in rural Texas towns.

As a % of the people who live in rural areas, Maine is #1. Texas is #36.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-rural-state

Guess your teacher never had you read the Federalist Papers so instead you listen to Sean and Tucker. The electoral college, in the words of the framers, was created so the "ignorant masses of voters" could be overruled by a few more cultured, educated men. Regardless, the number of voters should be key. Not how many trees are in a district. Ever wonder why nobody else uses the electoral system? They go with the novel idea that the person with the most votes wins. Brilliant......

Thanks for the response.

Cheers.

Small towns are a microcosm of what is going on in every area of the country: the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. It's just that small towns tend to have more poor people so they are getting squeezed harder.

Small towns used to create community wealth with shopping districts and hardware stores, etc. Now the big box stores are somewhere down the road and Dollar Generals are the only shopping in some towns. All the wealth that used to circulate in the community now goes out of town. If you buy a pair of socks or a pair of scissors, a majority of the profit goes to millionaires who have never heard of that small town and will never give anything back to improve the community.

I also enjoyed BJ Novak's Vengance!

You’re right they’re dying everywhere and that’s part of the political divide. These small towns once were railroads stops for shipping goods. They were once coal mining towns. They once had factories that produced American made goods. Then Nike and others came along with the lets make things cheaper in China. It killed small towns.

China and government controlled big ag killed small town America. That’s why those left in those areas vote right. Suburban/Urban liberals sit at their computers with their Starbucks and could care less. It doesn’t impact their way of life.

Very on point. Now these billionaires in conjunction with China own America. Most don’t want to admit it but it’s true.

No, I was recently in Bend, Oregon and it’s thriving.

Don’t kid yourself neither do the conservatives in the affluent Highland Park, Dallas give a damn about you either.

I’m not saying they care about small town ruraltans either. Actually it’s right wingers like the bush’s who love cheap illegal immigrant labor. They also like that big ag controls agriculture and small farmers are controlled by government seed. They just use small town rural to get votes so they can keep their big oil pockets full.

You obviously never read what happened in the constitutional convention.. we ain't a democracy... We are a democratic republic... You are denying what our founders created... I don't have TV... I don't watch partisaned BS

I’ve been to those NC towns and they are definitely shabby but they would almost be like thriving cities compared to west north Texas towns…Texas shabby is on whole nother level

Jeez...Have you even been to N Texas small towns? I doubt it...You couldn't be more wrong...

Please name a few...

Texas shabby - Ranger, Texas.

The decline of these towns is sad, but some of the smaller towns are growing like the county seats as everything is consolidated there across these smaller counties.

I used to travel to the Dakota's prior to the fracking revolution ... not sure how things changed, but there were tons of dying towns along the North Dakota/South Dakota border. The reality is urbanization unless you have some industry that can keep things afloat.

It's obvious he isn't from Texas and thinks anything north of Austin is "North Texas". North Texas is the fastest growing area in all the US including all the small towns around it (https://www.upnest.com/1/post/fastest-growing-cities-texas/).

He probably means the towns in the panhandle and the Plain's and canyons around there.

The towns in the West with economies based on tourism are thriving and those based on agriculture or mining have been dying for years. It shows up quite dramatically in voting patterns in a state like Colorado. All of the resort towns counties like Aspen and Telluride are solid blue and the non-tourist counties are red.

Aspen had over 5,000 people in the the 1890s but by the 1930s and 1940s there were only about 700. It was on its way to dying out until someone came up with the idea to build a ski lift.

You are clueless..Many towns in the west based on agriculture and mining are thriving....I live in one...Why do you speak with conviction about things you know nothing about?

I haven't been back to Belton in sometime. But it's doing well and a second high school just opened up recently.