Middlesboro’s 10,334 residents call their home The Magic City, and something about the Kentucky town’s nickname holds true. Built within a 3.6-mile-wide basin that scientists believe was formed by a giant meteorite, Middlesboro is the first gateway to the American west. Less than a mile from the narrow Cumberland Gap, it’s where frontiersmen first crossed the Appalachian mountain range. In the 1930s, it became the first municipality west of the Atlantic Seaboard to build an electric streetcar system, earning it the moniker “Little Las Vegas”; its renowned arts and crafts, opera house and superior schools won it another sobriquet in the 1950s: “Athens of the Mountains.”
Still the largest city in Southeastern Kentucky, Middlesboro is nestled near the state lines with Tennessee and Virginia. Since the decline of the coal industry, the area’s seen a persistent outmigration due to a lack of viable jobs, losing 1.8 percent of an ever-dwindling population over the past decade. Because there are so few positions (the county’s unemployment hovers north of 9 percent), and many employees aren’t prepared for high-skilled work (one-third of residents dropped out of high school), the median household income is $24,940, putting four in 10 residents of Bell County below the poverty line. Money’s tight and commutes to work are so far that the local newspaper, The Middlesboro Daily News, publishes a sidebar listing the price of gasoline at various stations. So many people now commute to the Volunteer State (where there’s more available jobs and no property or income tax), that Middlesboro’s shopping district has shifted closer to the border to entice drivers to stop on their way out of town.
As the micropolitan center of Southeastern Kentucky’s Promise Zone, one of the first five regions selected to pilot President Barack Obama’s economic redevelopment initiative targeting areas with generations of poverty (there are now 13), Middlesboro is positioning itself for a renaissance. Local organizers say the economic downturn compounded with Central Appalachia’s coal crisis led residents to reevaluate the region’s trajectory. With official support from the federal government (although no guarantee of funding, only extra points on federal grant applications to signal that the community is in dire need of help), a multi-pronged battle is being waged on the root causes and symptoms of unemployment, lackluster education, drug addiction and poor health outcomes across eight counties.
This broad, all-hands-on-deck investment takes a slightly different approach than past redevelopment, where programs concentrated efforts on the worst cases, says Jerry Rickett, executive director of the Kentucky Highland Investment Corporation (KHIC), the lead agency coordinating the Promise Zone. “President Johnson’s War on Poverty focused on poverty. The Promise Zone focuses on the quality of life for everyone,” Rickett explains.
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Grant money is funding human capital development, including job training through Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program (EKCEP) and anti-drug classes like Operation UNITE in every county in Southeastern Kentucky. In Rickett’s mind, success would mean a stabilized population and a diversified economy in the region. “Our young people could choose to stay, to raise a family and not worry about denying their children the advantage of a high performing school or finding employment,” he adds.
Past initiatives led to a chicken-and-egg problem where highly skilled workers left the region for jobs in nearby urban centers, and high skill jobs feared expanding to the region for lack of skilled workers. In contrast, the Promise Zone’s highly coordinated, regional effort could provide both in tandem. Now, EKCEP is hoping that infrastructure improvements to broadband will allow residents to take full advantage of internet connectivity for their work, for instance. The group is helping entrepreneurs to promote their business online and training a select group of coal miners to become coders.
It’s tough to measure change in metrics this early (especially since many local programs existed before the initiative and are now simply growing to scale), but the Promise Zone’s backers point to some early progress. In February 2014, unemployment exceeded 15 percent in eight counties of Southeastern Kentucky. But since the Promise Zone’s inception, the rate has plummeted six points, compared to a national drop of just two percentage points. And grant funding from the federal government has done more than just interject a nice flow of cash. It’s also encouraging industries to take a second look at the region. In the next five to seven years, KHIC has identified $189 million coming into the Promise Zone.
Within the eight counties that make up Southeastern Kentucky’s Promise Zone, residents also claim they’re witnessing greater civic participation. The number of official partners has expanded from 12 to 53 during the first year alone — a collaboration that brings to mind levels of engagement not seen since the battles to unionize the mines. And for the first time in recent memory, elections are being contested, campaigns waged between the establishment and reformers. Public meetings overflow with dozens in the audience.
There are still significant challenges to providing social services in a rural area. Unlike urban redevelopment, which can hone in on a few troubled blocks (as the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods have done successfully), rural revitalization presents the challenge of distance. The Promise Zone in Southeastern Kentucky stretches for 3,071 square miles, one and a half times the size of Delaware. It’s a two-hour drive from end to end, so it’s no surprise that the program’s coordinator, Sandi Curd, a farmer from Whitley County, says she spends most of her days in her red pickup truck.
The rigors of federal grants also create potential problems. Many are designed for dense urban areas, sometimes disqualifying a rural agency from applying. Operation UNITE, the organization fighting prescription drug abuse in the counties where the term “hillbilly heroin” was coined, couldn’t find a small cluster of blocks to target for a Department of Justice grant. “We could not get them to understand the difference between a radius in an urban area that’s 10 city blocks and what that [radius would be] in a rural area. We were turned down because they felt like we were trying to target more than one community, but really it’s that the communities are 10 miles apart,” says Debbie Trusty, Operation UNITE’s education director and a member of the Promise Zone’s health and education committee. “We reapplied after we were established as a Promise Zone and engaged with folks at the Department of Justice prior to applying. We were advised not to apply because they were afraid they weren’t able to establish different parameters.” Stumbling blocks like these have led to significant doubts about whether enough money will come in to make a difference.
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The coordinators at KHIC are quick to note that the Promise Zone is not a panacea for the region’s problems. “It’s one more tool in the toolkit,” Rickett says, readily admitting that the numbers don’t add up. “We have identified $189 million coming into the Promise Zone, but when you divide it by five to seven years and by eight counties, that’s less than 100 jobs a county, We lost 4,000 direct coal mining jobs and an estimated three indirect for every direct job,” he adds. “Will the Promise Zone fund revitalization? No, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.”
What’s different this time? Will the Promise Zone work? For Rickett, that’s asking the wrong questions. As he puts it, “It’s the only opportunity we have.”
If this last chance at redevelopment works, some might say the magic’s been in Middlesboro all along. But they’d be wrong. This isolated city in the highlands can’t be fixed by hope or superstition. It will require collaboration from the mountain men whose ancestors first cleared the frontier in search of solitude, and ingenuity from laborers who’ve toiled in the mines. And of course, it will take time.
A region devastated by a century of exploitation can’t expect a mystic transformation. That might be what it looks like when a new coffee shop opens on Main Street, the fish return to a local creek and a new family joins the congregation. But that’s not magic, that’s success.
READ MORE:
Part 1: Poverty Is a Way of Life in Appalachia. But This State Proves That It Doesn’t Have to Be
Part 3: Stories of Redemption in America’s Coal Country
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Tag: Appalachia
Poverty Is a Way of Life in Appalachia. But This State Proves That It Doesn’t Have to Be
In 1973, 180 coal miners in Harlan County, Ky., stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the picket line. They had been arrested and beaten with nightsticks; their wives had lain down in front of trucks and been thrown in jail by state troopers. Repeating the struggle their fathers waged during strikes in 1931 that earned the county the moniker “Bloody Harlan,” these miners, employees of Duke Power-owned Brookside Mines, endured 13 months of fighting for the right to unionize and earn a living wage, around $45 a day.
One young miner on strike, 23-year-old Lawrence Jones, died — shot by a mine supervisor — before coal operators caved to national pressure and accepted a new union contract. Even then, victory was short-lived. Just 30 years later, there’s not a single union miner working in Harlan County; in fact, there’s no union miners left in all of Kentucky, a region of Central Appalachia once considered the heart of coal country.
The story of Central Appalachia has a recurring plot line: economic boom, devastating bust, public acknowledgement, government assistance, boom, bust….and repeat. Last May, when President Barack Obama announced the launch of Promise Zones, an economic redevelopment plan to bring federal dollars to five regions with persistent poverty, those in Kentucky (the first rural pilot) recalled programs from other commanders in chief: FDR’s Works Progress Administration, Johnson’s War on Poverty and Clinton’s Empowerment Zones. Would this redevelopment be any different? Could it finally drag the mountain region out of poverty?
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A single-industry economy in southeastern Kentucky has led to a reliance on mining at the expense of all else. Even the area’s professional class — consisting of lawyers, bankers and doctors (some who certified or denied claims for disability and Black Lung benefits) — built their businesses around mining. For low-wage workers, coal mining promised decent work, often without the need for multiple diplomas, part of the reason why eastern Kentucky has no major research institution. The land has suffered, too. As strip mining became the cheapest way to extract coal, virgin hillsides were slashed and rarely replaced, leading to erosion and floods.
But natural resources run out — or become inaccessible. In Kentucky’s case, there’s still plenty of coal underground, but it’s too costly and environmentally damaging to extract it. As the Environmental Protection Agency tightens its regulations in what some call a “War on Coal,” the state has lost 7,000 direct mining jobs since 2012. Among residents of counties bordering Harlan, it’s said there’s a month-long wait to get a U-Haul because so many people are leaving town. The rumor’s unfounded (you can get a truck tomorrow), but it speaks to the worry that neighbors are fleeing, a fear of being stuck behind since no money means no development — in infrastructure or human capital. Fourth-generation coal miners in Harlan are hanging up their helmets and moving to urban areas with better employment prospects. The county’s population fell from a height of 75,275 to its lowest since 1920, currently around 28,000.
That’s not to say everything has been stagnant in the half-century since John F. Kennedy, a young senator from New England, first drew national attention to Central Appalachia on the presidential campaign trail. There’s been “progress in reducing isolation and providing assistance” for development, says Kostas Skordas, director of regional planning and research for the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state commission created in 1965, but the pace at which improvements happen is much slower than elsewhere in the nation. “Challenges still remain. Rural areas may progress, but in many cases, metro areas are progressing faster. The gap between Appalachian communities and the rest of the country has grown larger. Education is an example of that, health is an example of that.”
Appalachia is paying the price “in providing the cheap power that built the modern American economy,” Jason Bailey, director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, tells the Associated Press. ”The region has paid it in spoiled water and degraded land and black lung disease, broken backs, torn-up roads, blasted mountains,” issues that make it harder to rebuild a diversified economy.
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A region suffering from decades of persistent poverty due to an exploitative history of resource extraction is nothing new. (There’s the Black Belt of plantations from Maryland to Texas, the Mississippi River Delta, the Texas Colonias along the Mexican border and Indian Country in the Four Corners and the Dakotas, to name a few.) And of course, long before cheap coal ran out, the Iron Belt began rusting. But one state has been working for nearly 75 years to prepare mining towns for the inevitable day when resources run dry.
Minnesota’s Iron Range Resource and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB), a regional economic development agency, was founded by the state legislature in 1941 as a direct response to the one-sector economy in northeastern Minnesota falling apart during the Great Depression.
“Northeastern Minnesota has historically been largely dependent on a single industry, iron ore mining,” Mark Phillips, commissioner of IRRRB, tells NationSwell in an email. “The jobs of thousands of people and the economies of dozens of communities across the region have relied on iron ore mining and are impacted by technology or market changes within the industry.”
Iron-ore mining was once so pervasive in the region that a powdery, deep red dust blanketed entire towns — houses, cars, clothes. Today, IRRRB’s work is considered a public leader in pioneering economic diversification, land reclamation and social services like workforce development. Regional planning by the state agency enabled coordinated development, drawing federal attention and funding — bringing about long-term success that wouldn’t have been possible with isolated efforts.
That’s not to say there haven’t been missteps along the way. In the ’40s, one strategy they chose — diversifying mining operations by expanding from iron to taconite — was a booming success; agricultural experiments cultivating berries, rutabagas and potatoes, on the other hand, largely proved a bust. Eventually, timber (reviving forests that had been logged) and tourism (taking advantage of the state’s 10,000 lakes) developed as profitable sectors. Money paid for new educational facilities, focusing in particular on postsecondary vocational training.
IRRRB’s investment in human capital (something lacking in Appalachia, studies have shown) — education and workforce development — has paid off large dividends. “IRRRB programs and projects have helped existing businesses in the region remain competitive, helped attract a wide range of new jobs and companies to northeastern Minnesota,” Phillips says. Their work “increased the region’s quality of life within communities and assisted in supporting innovative educational programs in our schools and colleges.”
Kentucky’s Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat in office since 2007, and a congressman, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, an 18-term Republican, heard about Minnesota’s success. Working together on a federal-state partnership to redefine southeastern Kentucky (Shaping Our Appalachian Region or SOAR), they held a conference for roughly 2,000 people from across the rural area, remembers Gerry Roll, executive director of Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, a philanthropic community foundation. Those in attendance heard this message: “Coal is still important, it’ll be around for a while, but we need to start thinking beyond that. We need to think about new ideas, with broadband, with infrastructure, with things that will bring people to our region.”
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It became a watershed moment. “All of a sudden, everybody in the room was saying we need to do something different. We have to work together and work harder. I think there was an acknowledgment — not only from a Democrat and a Republican talking to each other, but old people and young people, environmentalists and coal miners talking to each other — that we may not agree on everything, but we need to start where we can,” Roll says. “I think the SOAR initiative gave us permission to think more broadly, outside of our usual box, and the economy was really an opportunity for us to say we’re better together. These 120 little fiefdoms that Kentucky has aren’t going to make it alone.”
The hardscrabble miners in Harlan County once proved that organizing into a union could win them major concessions from the coal mine operators. Now, a hard push for bottom-up change through Obama’s Promise Zones could once again prove the power of banding together.
READ MORE:
Part 2: The Initiative That’s Bringing Appalachia into the 21st Century
Part 3: Stories of Redemption in America’s Coal Country
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How Homegrown Roots Can Save Local Food Economies
When the local economy is threatened, what do you do?
While some may turn to outside forces for help, others turn to the people at the heart of the matter: the community. That’s exactly what residents of Asheville, N.C. did by bringing to fruition a homegrown solution through the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP).
With the changes in the tobacco industry and the trend towards larger agricultural farms, North Carolina communities realized that something needed to be done to preserve their farmers, which are constrained in size because of the mountainous landscape. That answer came in the form of a group of volunteers led by Charlie Jackson.
The group began by taking it to the streets, publicizing local farms and products through door-to-door campaigns, newspaper articles and radio announcements. It also printed a Local Food Guide as well as a weekly “Fresh at the Farmer’s Market” report, according to the Sustainable Cities Collective.
In 2002, the nonprofit ASAP was born.
Since then, it has expanded its efforts by starting the “Appalachian Grown” program, which offers certification to local farms, restaurants, distributers and grocers. Acceptance into this elite group entitles members to technical assistance, marketing support, training and a network of other local food providers.
Preserving an economy requires all generations, which is why ASAP is going into schools to educate youths through its “Growing Minds Farm to School” program. Working with schools, ASAP organizes school gardens, local food cooking classes, farm field trips and local food service in the cafeteria, as well as training teachers and dietitians.
The purpose of the program is to make local food a commodity which everyone can enjoy, which is why a large percentage of students receive free or reduced lunch.
For Jackson, though, the movement is about the community, so it leads the project, which has the added benefit minimizing infrastructure issues.
“It’s really important to ASAP that a just food system’s going to include everybody,” Jackson tells Sustainable Cities Collective. “Right now, we’re thinking about this as a movement. Focusing on local is an amazing way to create community dialogue and democracy that we don’t have in our food community right now.”
Through the work of ASAP, the western North Carolina agriculture economy is thriving, and Asheville has become a cultural hub. And for a region that was on the brink of disappearance 15 years ago, it just goes to show what a difference a little home fertilization can make.
MORE: This Startup Uses Urban Relics to Serve Up Local Food