The Other Side of the Blacktop

What Rural America Already Knows About Failed Cities

The people who live in small towns do not need a book to tell them that cities fail. They have been watching it happen from the other side of the county line for three generations. A factory closes in Gary and the relatives move back. Another closes in Flint, and the cousins come home with nothing except a lease they cannot break on an apartment in a neighborhood where the water is no longer safe to drink. Camden, Detroit, Cairo, Illinois: the small towns that once sent their young people to those cities for work receive them back, older, with fewer options and the particular exhaustion of people who went where the opportunity was supposed to be and found that it had left before they arrived.

I have written a book about this. It is called The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse, and it examines twenty cities that died or are dying, organized into five categories of failure. But the book is written from inside the cities. It looks at the infrastructure, the governance, the economics, the racial structures, the planning failures. It is an urban book about urban problems.

This article is not that. This article is about what the book looks like from out here.

Rural America has a relationship with urban collapse that the urban literature almost never acknowledges. The relationship runs deeper than sympathy, deeper than indifference. It is recognition. The small town that loses its grain elevator, its school, its post office, its single remaining doctor, knows exactly what Detroit experienced when General Motors pulled out. Scale differs. Mechanism is identical. A community organized around a single economic function loses that function and discovers that everything else, the tax base, the services, the population, the maintenance of the physical plant, was contingent on the thing that left. Gary depended on U.S. Steel. Flint depended on General Motors. The coal towns of Appalachia depended on the extraction companies that employed them. The book traces the cascade that follows when the single employer departs: the tax base contracts, the services deteriorate, the population declines, the remaining residents bear an increasing share of the cost of maintaining infrastructure built for a population three or four times their number, and the spiral accelerates with each rotation.

Any rancher in western Kansas who has watched the feedlot close and the equipment dealer follow it and the diner follow that and the school consolidate into a district forty miles wide can diagram that cascade on a napkin. The vocabulary is different. The phenomenon is identical.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, appears in the book as a case of catastrophic erasure: a coal mine fire that has been burning underground since 1962, hollowing out the earth beneath the town until the government relocated the residents and revoked the zip code. Prairie Voice readers will recognize a parallel that the urban planning literature does not draw. The coal towns of Wyoming and Montana that sit above played-out seams are emptying by the same logic, minus the drama. The resource that justified the town’s existence is exhausted or uneconomical, and without it the town has no function that would attract replacement population. Centralia’s fire is dramatic. The quiet closure of a strip mine in the Powder River Basin is not. Both produce the same outcome: a place that was built to serve an extraction economy and has no second act.

Laurent, South Dakota, is the case study that sits closest to Prairie Voice territory. In 2003, a developer announced plans to build a Deaf-centered community on the South Dakota prairie. The idea was serious. The location was real. More than a hundred families signed reservation forms. National media covered it. And then nobody moved. The company dissolved, Miller left the state, and the town was never built.

The book examines Laurent as a utopian misfire, a community planned from ideological first principles that failed because the distance between enthusiastic endorsement and actual relocation turned out to be the distance between an idea and a life. From the Prairie Voice perspective, Laurent is something else. It is a specific instance of a pattern that repeats across the rural West with regularity. Planned communities fail on the prairie. They have been failing since New Harmony dissolved in 1827. The conditions that defeat them are logistical down to the bone. Isolation is real on the plains, and the absence of services is real, and the distance to a hospital, a grocery store, an employer, is a Tuesday afternoon problem that the people who sign reservation forms from apartments in Brooklyn or Silver Spring discover when they visit the site. The prairie has specific demands. The communities that survive on it organized themselves around meeting those demands rather than around a vision imported from somewhere else.

California City is the most extreme version. A real estate developer named Nat Mendelsohn purchased 80,000 acres of Mojave Desert in 1958, platted a city larger than the footprint of Los Angeles, graded hundreds of miles of residential roads, and waited for the population to arrive. It did not arrive. Today, California City is the third largest city in California by area and one of the smallest by population. The graded roads run through empty desert, named and numbered and leading to vacant lots where houses were supposed to stand.

The rural West is full of graded roads leading to nothing. They are called section lines, and in the Dakotas, in Montana, in the Nebraska Sandhills, they cross landscapes where the homesteads they were meant to serve were abandoned within a decade of settlement. Congress created a grid of planned habitation across the western prairie through the Homestead Act, and the prairie defeated most of it within a generation. Roads remain. People do not. California City’s empty grid is the Homestead Act’s empty grid, accelerated and compressed into a single speculative venture.

The book’s diagnostic framework identifies three levels of analysis for every failed city: the baseline condition (what the city had before the crisis), the triggering condition (what initiated the decline), and the cascade (the self-reinforcing cycle that follows). Rural readers will notice that this framework applies with equal precision to the small towns that the book does not examine. A Great Plains wheat town’s baseline condition is monoeconomic dependency on agriculture plus geographic isolation plus a population below the threshold required to sustain independent services. Consolidation supplies the trigger: the elevator closes, the school merges, the county seat absorbs the remaining functions. And the cascade that follows is identical to the urban version, compressed into a smaller population but operating by the same arithmetic.

The Failed City does not make this connection. The book stays inside the city limits. But the connection exists, and it is worth articulating here, because Prairie Voice has spent years documenting the hidden systems that sustain and destroy rural communities, and the diagnostic framework that the book builds for cities works for towns. Vocabulary translates. Math translates. And the institutional habit of burying failure rather than studying it translates most precisely of all, because rural America has been filing away its abandoned towns, its failed homesteads, its collapsed communities for a century and a half, and nobody has assembled the evidence into a systematic account of how and why they died.

That is the next book. Or it is this book, read from the other side of the county line. Either way, the cobblestones are beneath the blacktop, and the section lines still cross the empty prairie, and the evidence of what failed is more durable than anyone who was responsible for the failure.

The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse is available from David Boles Books at BolesBooks.com.