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Editorial: Grundy, you're on your own
Editorial: Grundy, you're on your own
Dec 23, 2019
Some problems simply have no solutions. Math is full of them and they all have exotic names: Crouzeix Conjecture. The Pompeiu Problem.
The New York Times economics writer, Eduardo Porter, recently travelled to Southwest Virginia to visit Grundy. He looked at all the ways the town and surrounding Buchanan County have tried build a post-coal economy. A law school. A pharmacy school. Tourism for all-terrain-vehicle trails or a re-introduced elk population. The question the story posed: “Can a coal town reinvent itself?”
What if the answer is the same as with all those math problems? What if the answer to the Coal Town Problem is “no”?
For all of the millions spent on Grundy — $170 million alone to relocate downtown as part of a flood-control program — Porter writes that the town’s basic problems remain. “We are a one-industry town, and that’s coal,” says Jay Rife, the head of the county’s Industrial Development Authority. And coal continues its inexorable decline, as the world shifts to forms of energy other than coal. As coal jobs disappear, so do people. The county’s population is down by 10.5% since 2010 —a faster rate of decline than any other county in the state. The middle and elementary school population has shrunk even faster — by a fifth — in the past decade. The remaining population is old and getting older. About the only thing up in the county are Social Security payments and Medicare payments. Porter quotes one county resident who laments: “This county will never prosper again.”
Is he right? What if a coal town can’t reinvent itself? The story quotes a local contractor: “There has been a ton of money spent in Buchanan County through grants. Not one penny has provided a replacement job for coal workers.”
This is a problem for more than just Grundy or other coal towns; it’s a problem for other small communities across the country that have seen their traditional employers wither and die — and not be replaced. The vaunted “new economy” is happening somewhere other than here. A new report by the Brookings Institution finds that just five metro areas in the country accounted for 90% of the growth in “innovation sector” jobs.
The New York Times story doesn’t offer solutions, it simply documents the problem and poses a question without an answer.
Dec 23, 2019
Some problems simply have no solutions. Math is full of them and they all have exotic names: Crouzeix Conjecture. The Pompeiu Problem.
The New York Times economics writer, Eduardo Porter, recently travelled to Southwest Virginia to visit Grundy. He looked at all the ways the town and surrounding Buchanan County have tried build a post-coal economy. A law school. A pharmacy school. Tourism for all-terrain-vehicle trails or a re-introduced elk population. The question the story posed: “Can a coal town reinvent itself?”
What if the answer is the same as with all those math problems? What if the answer to the Coal Town Problem is “no”?
For all of the millions spent on Grundy — $170 million alone to relocate downtown as part of a flood-control program — Porter writes that the town’s basic problems remain. “We are a one-industry town, and that’s coal,” says Jay Rife, the head of the county’s Industrial Development Authority. And coal continues its inexorable decline, as the world shifts to forms of energy other than coal. As coal jobs disappear, so do people. The county’s population is down by 10.5% since 2010 —a faster rate of decline than any other county in the state. The middle and elementary school population has shrunk even faster — by a fifth — in the past decade. The remaining population is old and getting older. About the only thing up in the county are Social Security payments and Medicare payments. Porter quotes one county resident who laments: “This county will never prosper again.”
Is he right? What if a coal town can’t reinvent itself? The story quotes a local contractor: “There has been a ton of money spent in Buchanan County through grants. Not one penny has provided a replacement job for coal workers.”
This is a problem for more than just Grundy or other coal towns; it’s a problem for other small communities across the country that have seen their traditional employers wither and die — and not be replaced. The vaunted “new economy” is happening somewhere other than here. A new report by the Brookings Institution finds that just five metro areas in the country accounted for 90% of the growth in “innovation sector” jobs.
The New York Times story doesn’t offer solutions, it simply documents the problem and poses a question without an answer.
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