To what extent do the sensibilities of the rural working class pervade American society, especially in terms of its geographic mode of development?
There is a theory that one group in society can be culturally dominant.
In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.
The upper classes – by owning newspapers (thereby controlling editorials) and by funding the arts (e.g., symphonies), for example – shape the overall cultural tone of society, reinforcing not only the dominant political views but also the traditional value system.
Today in the USA, it is not the upper classes that are necessarily perceived as the arbiters of judgment.
In particular, there is a widely influential theory in urban planning that blighted areas of cities attract artists looking for cheap rent, and this later leads to revitalization of the area, which attracts global elites. Related to this influential theory is a popular notion that young educated “creatives” are the actual pioneers, tastemakers and leaders of society.
One problem with this view is that the (supposedly urban) “creative class” that makes up 30% of the American workforce is not so creative. The “super-creative core” of this class who make up 18% of the US workforce are advanced technicians (engineers, computer scientists), and the “creative professionals” that make up 12% of the US workforce (lawyers, accountants) are even less creative.
(Another problem with this theory is that it seems to derive from British [Marxist?] urban planning studies of the 1950s that illustrated how urban areas hit by blight would be first colonized by artists and later end up gentrified; the inhabitants of these areas first fell into poverty, then were displaced. The current American version of this theory is shorn of any critical reflection and is essentially an enthusiastic instruction manual on “Gentrification 101”.)
Urban professionals and corporate executives are not particularly creative or youthful, but perhaps they do exert a kind of cultural influence through their patronage – exactly as neo-Marxists would predict. But the public perception is that the torch has passed to a new generation of young creatives.
This notion of a “creative class” seems to be associated with the “Millennial” generation, often identified as those born sometime between 1980 and 2000. They are portrayed in contradictory ways, and often display traits that everyone has adopted since the 2000s (use of social media, frugality) or that were already engrained in previous generations (narcissism). The most exaggerated profile of the Millennial generation might best applied to educated, urban Millennials. In particular, their minimalist lifestyles supposedly require less physical space and revolve around cyberspace (social media).
One irony here is that young Millennials – typically portrayed as struggling to pay off their student debt – are at least tacitly seen to be the culturally dynamic force in American society, as opposed to the top 1% of income earners. However, it does seem that Millennials are quite adaptable. Some Millennials will live in dormitories in the city, or in houses in the suburbs, or in RVs on the road. They adapt.
The Rural Working Class is likewise beleaguered. However, in another irony, it could be that they have long been culturally influential in terms of the American geographic mode of development.
Unfortunately, in terms of their relation to space, the Rural Working Class might not be so adaptable.
1) They are most reluctant to move from their small community no matter how bad things get. (In the event that they do move away, it is to an outer suburb of a “red” state.)
2) They are not inclined to pursue a college education or even advanced job training.
3) They so often blame outsiders for their problems.
4) They will not live in an apartment, they insist on living in houses.
5) They resist driving cars, and insist on driving big trucks and SUVs.
This leads to a couple of dilemmas regarding housing:
- Cities have abundant job opportunities without sufficient housing.
- Rural areas have plentiful land without adequate jobs.
Nevertheless, there is a rural housing crisis, despite abundant land. The problem is low incomes in rural areas.
The map shows how much more severe the problem is in urban counties. Overall, they have 42 units per every 100 low-income renting household, compared to 62 among rural counties. But in a blog post, the UI researchers note that while housing costs are lower in the countryside, so are incomes. And poverty rates are higher.
The problem is that whatever drives the economy – tourism, immigration – also drives up prices.
In some small towns, rising rents are making the affordability crisis worse. Small resort towns, like Breckenridge, Colorado, and Traverse City, Michigan, are feeling the squeeze of gentrification. Tourism fuels the economy, opening up jobs for locals and seasonal workers, but affordable rentals are hard to find. And many landlords can earn more from short-term rentals to tourists than long-term leases to residents.
In some communities, like Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta, deep-seeded economic distress from manufacturing job loss and changes in the agriculture industry has made it harder for families to cover basic expenses. With the poverty rate and unemployment rate nearly double the national average, many Sunflower County households have too few resources to afford housing.
To sacrifice tourism and eliminate immigration would indeed drive down the high cost of living. It would also destroy the economy. The Rural Working Class does not always understand this because they assume that things would go back to the happy way they once were if trade was curtailed. They seem to think that if imports were eliminated then agriculture and manufacturing would come roaring back.
There is the obvious argument that trade creates jobs. But this might be beside the point for the Rural Working Class because those new jobs might not be in rural areas.
Also, the decline of manufacturing and agricultural employment is mostly due to technological progress. The good news is that new technology creates new jobs. Again, the problem is that the new jobs are not in rural areas. It's been like this since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, which was fueled by farmers working in factories after being made obsolete by new farming technology.
In some sectors, technology has quite clearly cost jobs, but Stewart and his colleagues question whether they are really jobs we would want to hold on to. Technology directly substitutes human muscle power and, in so doing, raises productivity and shrinks employment.
“In the UK the first sector to feel this effect on any scale was agriculture,” says the study.
In 1871, 6.6% of the workforce of England and Wales were classified as agricultural labourers. Today that has fallen to 0.2%, a 95% decline in numbers.
The census data also provide an insight into the impact on jobs in a once-large, but now almost forgotten, sector. In 1901, in a population in England and Wales of 32.5 million, 200,000 people were engaged in washing clothes. By 2011, with a population of 56.1 million just 35,000 people worked in the sector.
“A collision of technologies, indoor plumbing, electricity and the affordable automatic washing machine have all but put paid to large laundries and the drudgery of hand-washing,” says the report.
(There is a sense today that “this time it’s different”, that new technology such as Artificial Intelligence will eliminate jobs and not create new opportunities. But that’s what they always say.)
Another problem is that these people simply will not move into apartments.
Australia has a similar problem in terms of a reluctance to move into apartments.
In its first three sentences, the following article points out the connection (and chasm) between the need for single-family housing in the suburbs and the government's response, which is to build more apartments in the city.
As is well known, the shortage of affordable separate housing in Sydney and Melbourne means that most first home buyers and renters cannot currently find housing suited to their needs in locations of their choice.
The dominant response from the housing industry and commentators is that governments must unlock the potential for more intensive development of the existing suburbs. From this standpoint, the recent surge in high-rise apartment construction in Sydney and Melbourne is part of the solution.
The article and the Australian government both assume that young families need houses in the suburbs in order to grow. The article also points out that the government is assuming that there are now one-person and childless households in the suburbs that can be accommodated with apartments in the city. Unfortunately, these households are largely comprised of retirees who do not want to move into apartments in the city.
It is true that there will be a large increase in the number of single person and couple families over the decade. However, most of this increase will be amongst older, already established households. The evidence indicates that the great majority are ageing in place.
This combination of high dwelling needs of young residents as well as from NOM, along with the blocking effect of the ageing population, is contributing to a severe and continuing squeeze on the detached housing markets in Sydney and Melbourne. This is particularly marked in the inner and middle suburbs.
The reason is that, by 2011, 50 to 60% of this housing stock was occupied by householders aged 50 (See Table 10 in the report). This situation will get worse as the number of these older households increases.
The study compared the recent pattern of dwelling approvals by housing type in Sydney and Melbourne with the needs implied by the dwelling projections. The conclusion was that there are too few separate houses being approved in both cities and too many apartments, especially in Melbourne.
The Australian government never foresaw that senior citizens would prefer to remain in their suburban homes, and this has thrown off the housing projections. As a consequence, Australians cannot afford homes in the inner and middle suburbs, and are being forced to purchase homes in the outer suburbs.
According to the last three sentences of the article, the typical apartment in the city that is being built is only about 650 square feet large. It says this is because this small size is what investors want.
This is because the recent surge in approvals is way above the need for such dwellings. This is especially the case in Melbourne. The apartments being approved are predominantly tiny 60 square metre or smaller dwellings with no access to protected outdoor space. They are totally unsuitable for raising a family. They are tiny because most investors prefer to buy at prices below $600,000.
That last sentence is peculiar because the Australian government approved the construction of small apartments in order to house retirees who, it turns out, don't want to move into apartments. In fact, that was the central argument of the article. Indeed, investors may be purchasing the apartments, but the apartments were originally built for singles, childless couples and seniors – that is why they are small.
Another peculiarity is the way the article associates the suburbs with families. In developed societies with high population densities, such as in northern Europe and Asia, families with children live in apartments in the city. (In Asia, families are associated with cities, and seniors are associated with largely abandoned small towns.)
Australians love the suburbs. Young Australian families cannot imagine living in the city, and even Australian policy makers cannot countenance the idea of families moving to the city. So why should it come as a surprise that Australian retirees likewise want to avoid city life? Theoretically, having everyone live in the city might be the rational policy for developed societies, but Australians want nothing to do with it.
Australians like to boast that they are a “fully modern” society that is 90% "urban". Actually, Australians overwhelmingly prefer the dispersed suburban mode of development. Even Australian cities, where the favored hobby of many a nice young accountant and computer scientist is the drunken fistfight, have a certain rural feel.
What does a map tell us?
A map of global population density:
Australia does not appear to have the high population densities that other societies have, but it could be that Australia simply does not have the huge population that other societies have.
What do the numbers tell us?
By using census tract data, rather than municipality data, Gordon, et al were able to avoid the misleading but readily accessible jurisdictional analysis (central city versus suburbs) that equated large low-density central municipalities like Calgary and Edmonton, with more compact and dense municipalities like Vancouver and Montreal (or New York with Phoenix).
A critical geographic breakdown of the typical Australian "metropolitan" population:
- 12% in the city proper ("active core")
- 10% in inner suburbs ("transit suburbs")
- 71% in middle and outer suburbs ("auto suburban")
- 7% rural ("exurbs")
Interestingly, metropolitan areas in Canada share an almost identical population density profile as Australia.
The geographic composition of metropolitan areas in the USA diverges somewhat in percentages and in terminology from that of Australia and Canada.
- 1% in city proper ("urban core")
- 13% in inner suburbs ("inner ring")
- 70% in middle and outer suburbs ("auto suburban")
- 16% rural ("exurbs")
The numbers suggest that Americans really hate the city, even compared to other English-speaking countries.
One reason for this is the tastes and desires of the Rural Working Class in the English-speaking world.
Suburbs are what the rural working class wants. Some in the rural working class who are under intense economic pressure may eventually move away from their small towns. They will move to outer suburbs, but they will not move into apartments in the city, or even to the inner suburbs. (This is the recent history of Texas.)
Los Angeles is the exemplary case. Los Angeles was essentially invented and developed by the ultra-conservative Chandler family, who recruited settlers from the small-town Midwest to live LA’s new suburbs, freshly built on desert sand.
One consequence of this is a persistent hostility by LA suburbanites toward building even within suburbs that were established in the 1950s. Today, there is new construction in the downtown areas, as well as in the outer suburbs, but the middle suburbs shut down new construction decades ago. “There are pockets of high-density construction at the urban core and rapid building along the metropolitan periphery, but lagging growth in the dormant suburban interior.” A series of maps of suburban Los Angeles looks like a succession of brain scan of a patient with dementia, in which entire sections have increasingly turned into voids. It’s the ultimate suburban NIMBYism.
Why haven’t these established suburban areas been redeveloped?
One argument is that development in the 1950s America was uniquely grandiose.
Since the Great Depression and WW2, new technology enabled the government and corporations to build American infrastructure on a grand scale. This was a stark divergence from the traditional mode of development all around the world involving small-scale, incremental, local-level, unplanned growth. Even worse, the thinking behind the grand American infrastructure projects during the middle of the 20th century was essentially utopian and based on the idea that once this new infrastructure was laid down, there would be no need for future development.
Importantly, this infrastructure was suburban in nature.
It is refreshing to see an urban planner point out that the problem is not “overdevelopment” but rather a utopian hostility toward further development.
However, one problem with this narrative is that this kind of utopian planning is ubiquitous. The real difference in the USA is not utopianism, but suburbanism. The utopian visions of other societies seemed to be more urban in nature.
Another problem with the commentary is that the motive for the suburban mode of development in the USA is not addressed. That is, grand utopian development schemes are everywhere, but it is American cities like LA that opted for an almost purely suburban style of development.
There are multiple historical factors in the American abhorrence of city life. A few that relate to the status, political role and character of the Rural Working Class are worth mentioning.
The grimness of the early Industrial Revolution in Britain drove elites out to the periphery of the cities. Subsequently, in the English-speaking world, the suburbs became both an escape from economic life and a status symbol.
There is also the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent citizen-soldier-farmer inherited from the Roman republic. This ramifies throughout the evolution of the “American Dream”. (In its earliest form, it was a hope of religious freedom; later, of democracy. By the 21st century, the McMansion was the American Dream, and by the 2010s, the American Dream became the “California Dream” of instant, effortless celebrity.)
But one largely overlooked yet powerful influence would be the early settlement of the American colonies, which in fact first took place in the southeastern US. This was a chaotic and violent time and place, until the region was stabilized by the cultural hegemony of the Virginia aristocracy. Later, there was the settlement of the vast area ranging from the Appalachian Mountains to Texas by fiercely independent peoples from the anarchic and impoverished border region between Scotland and England (and from Northern Ireland). Their descendants, who still distrust cities and elites, have had an outsized influence politically and culturally on the USA. (There is also the chaotic nature of the settlement of the western USA.)
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