Report on rural South: Bigger isn’t always better
Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, named chairman of the non-partisan SGPB last year, prepared to welcome the governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, West Virginia and Arkansas. U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao is scheduled to deliver the keynote address on Monday.
More than 400 people were expected to attend the conference at the Grand Hotel on Mobile Bay.
A report prepared for release at the conference suggests that residents of the rural South are tired of the “more” mantra, saying bigger isn’t always better. Instead, many want to enhance and preserve small-town character, not accumulate urban amenities.
Such results were not what researchers had expected, according to Jim Clinton, executive director of the North Carolina-based SGPB, which sponsored the “2005 Report on the Future of the South.”
To produce the report, researchers met with 2,200 rural residents through focus groups, retreats, community forums and surveys. Those people expressed a desire to better retain and attract youth to rural communities, as well as a need for “strong, forward-thinking leadership,” Clinton said.
“They don’t really like it when people or organizations try to tie the success of a community to whether it’s getting big or not,” Clinton said. “They want it to get better, not necessarily a lot larger. They don’t want it to get urban.”
He added, “That probably means we have to find some solutions that we haven’t figured out yet.”
About 20 percent of Americans, and 34 percent of Southerners, live in rural areas — places where the soil is rich, but the people are poor, according to the report.
“There are an awful lot of good things coming out of the South and rural communities,” Clinton said. However, “a fair evaluation of the rural areas of the South overall is they lag in educational achievement and economic performance. There is work to be done.”
From 1950 to 1980, the South made a lot of economic progress based on industrial recruitment, Clinton said, but during the past two decades, the South hasn’t grown as fast as the rest of the nation, especially because Southern labor isn’t nearly as cheap as rates earned by workers overseas.
“That’s a new challenge for us,” Clinton said. “A big question that we face as a culture: Are we willing to work more cheaply than we have in the past? Or are we willing to learn to work smarter than we have in the past?”
On the Net:
www.blackbeltaction.org
www.southern.org