Depressed Areas
Maybe most of us at some time will have been to (or at least read about) a depressed area. The sort of town where the dominant industry has collapsed and there's high unemployment. The schools underperform because everyone knows there are no jobs at the end of it. The shops don't sell anything worth browsing as there's not much disposable income around. Litter and graffiti. The spiral of decline.
Are there creative solutions that don't amount to throwing large amounts of money at the problem ? "Teach a man to fish" etc ?
Do we understand why wages and prices don't fall to the level at which new industries are attracted ?
Some have advocated parish councils. Or community currency. Or putting the unemployed to work planting trees and improving the visual environment. Can any of these ideas be made to work ?
Is there best practice from other countries?
Are there creative solutions that don't amount to throwing large amounts of money at the problem ? "Teach a man to fish" etc ?
Do we understand why wages and prices don't fall to the level at which new industries are attracted ?
Some have advocated parish councils. Or community currency. Or putting the unemployed to work planting trees and improving the visual environment. Can any of these ideas be made to work ?
Is there best practice from other countries?

Comments
My experience of this (inner-city Manchester and Salford over the last 30 years) is that when industry collapses, so does the local council tax take, and the local public sector cannot do much to change things. Then things get worse for a while, and developers who can afford to take a very long (20-30 year) view hoover up land at very low prices and do nothing with it.
Eventually central government stumps up some money and those developers bid for public money to ‘do something’ with the (ahem) waste land they have been sitting on. Sometimes the claimed viability of such projects depends on compulsory purchase orders of land and houses which is still occupied - where tenants, landlords and owner-occupiers can occasionally do OK, but sometimes get utterly screwed.
If your street runs to ruin because someone has their eye on it for a fat profit in 10 years’ time, the fact you paid for your house counts for nothing when it suits someone powerful to let its ‘market value’ collapse to nothing. Good luck finding the money to rent a 2 bed flat in the patch where your very own 3 bed terrace used to stand.
(Lower Broughton terrace = slum/ CPO, Didsbury terrace = artisan cottage. What bullshit).
If a ‘depressed area’ is ever to rise, somehow Someone has to see a realistic sliver of potential.
Planting trees is all well and good but that sort of activity in the uk has tended to come with inflated promises of employment yet in reality is nothing more than jobless opportunity schemes . That end.
Government response is typically to subsidize some industry or other. We've gone through potash, potatoes, pigs, and more recently oil and gas with the tar sands. The next thing is going to be nuclear (again) in the form of small reactors, if the provincial gov't has it's way. We have lots of uranium.
It’s the the 31st most deprived place in England, based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which takes into account things such as wages, employment, education, health and housing standards.
A huge amount of money has been spent on it by the Council in the last four years. I’m not sure if where the money came from (EU?) but it runs into tens of millions. The flats by us - a sprawling, horrible, low rise estate - is slowly being replaced by neat little town houses - public housing. About a third of the estate has been done so far. Much of the decent public housing has been ‘done up’ and some soulless 60s tower blocks, a mixture of public and private, are due for replacement. But Numerous academics, campaigners and professionals have put their name to a letter objecting to their removal - which is also addressed to Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and our MP.
The borough housing department insists its plans will ensure a ‘better quality of mix’ of homes in the town centre, meeting future need and guaranteeing no one will be forced to leave the area if they do not wish to.
Fifty seven councillors put their names to a letter demanding specific details of its redevelopment plans for the estates.
The council are very good at looking after green spaces and putting flower planters etc around the place. They are also top notch on keeping on top of litter.
We have a big, well kept park. It’s not well used at all. The three excellent playgrounds are often totally free of children 😢
The thing is, your deprived area is pretty close to some other area that isn't so deprived. Price differences for portable goods will be arbitraged away immediately. Prices for services do tend to be lower in economically depressed areas.
As far as the question "why doesn't X company go and set up in location Y where there's a lot of people needing work", most industries aren't labour intensive any more. The ones that are labour intensive tend to be service type industries, where it's hard to replace people with machines, and by construction those require the people to be where the customers are.
What modern industry tends to want is technical expertise, supply chains, and easy access to repairs when something breaks. It's easier to have access to that if you set up shop close to existing similar industries.
The exception to the service industry co-location issue is contact centres, but the money is generally rubbish, the development prospects limited, and a lot of firms are cutting wage bills by offshoring and/or automating lots of routine stuff with chat bots.
Neoclassical or mainstream economics: probably that wages would have to fall to a level below benefits or the minimum wage (right-wing economists), or the level at which people couldn't survive on them anyway (left-wing economists), so it's not in the interests of people to work for wages that are low enough to be in the interests of industry to offer.
Keynesian and Marxist economics: because there isn't sufficient demand to motivate industry to expand capacity; and industry won't expand capacity by cutting prices when it isn't sure of demand. (Keynes: because people are largely averse to that kind of risk. Marx: because industry won't offer wages that are less than the work is actually worth. (*))
Not if you rule out spending money. The Keynesian recipe is to hand out money to the unemployed, preferably by finding some useful infrastructure project to employ them on, but just handing out money if necessary, in order to increase demand. Marx isn't in the business of recommending solutions to capitalist states. Right-wing mainstream economists will recommend cutting benefits or the minimum wage (along with increasingly elaborate explanations as to why there is no empirical support for this solution). Centre-left mainstream economists will probably recommend education and may get a bit Keynesian.
(*) That is what I meant to say.
1) More and better roads
2) More and better airports
3) Broadband
No industry will come to an area that has poor transportation and communication infrastructure.
Good roads and airports are essential to better public transport
Not everyone in depressed areas can afford to run a car or hop on a plane.
What struck me most was that life was much harder for those of my children's friends' families who lived on the other side of the road, in myriad soul destroying ways.
For example, my daughter had a mid morning routine outpatient eye test at the hospital. I picked her up during morning break, drove her to the hospital, returned her to school during lunchtime and we went into town after school with her prescription to get her glasses. Her best friend had had an appointment the week before at the same time of day. Her mother had had to take two buses - one into the centre of the city, the other out to the hospital. Then afterwards they took the bus into the city and went to get her glasses before getting the bus home. My daughter missed less than two hours of school; her friend missed an entire day. Likewise, taking my daughter to her appointment and then later to get her glasses took a chunk out of my day, but it swallowed most of her friends' mothers day.
Likewise shopping; there was a large supermarket with plenty of fresh fruit and veg nearby - I could walk there for a small shop, or drive for a big shop. Friends' mother didn't have a car, and was ten minutes further walk away from the supermarket. So she mostly shopped in the shops within the estate, which sold a more limited range of food.
We moved out of the area when our kids were 8 and 6; three of the academic families from my son's class had already gone. We didn't leave because of the area, but because our son and daughter were getting too old to share a bedroom. I loved the school as a first school for my kids, but realistically, the further up the school they went, the more the social problems experienced by some kids impacted on the class as a whole. It wasn't till we moved that I realised just how big the gap was; both my kids went from being near the top of their classes in the first school to very average in the second. My daughter summed it up - In the first school, the most important thing was to be kind, in the second the most important thing was to be clever. I'm glad they started off with the emphasis on kindness, but long term the kids in the first school had a much harder slog to achieve good qualifications, and most of them didn't.
I don't know what would have changed things; unemployment wasn't the issue, but the families who were in employment were in minimum wage jobs. My daughter's friend's mother was a single parent (widowed very young) and couldn't get a job that would fit round her kids. There was a cycle of deprivation - those who left school with few qualifications and went into minimum wage jobs started their families younger, and then having children limited their opportunities.
So many articles about depressed rural and semi-rural areas are accompanied by pictures that show them to be absolutely gorgeous. Every time I see this I think there have got to be people who want to work remotely and not live in a major metropolitan area.
Certainly that gave a leg-up to quite a few of the generation before mine in Oz ( read immigrant Irish Catholics) and to a greater degree in my generation when university was ( briefly) free.
Our political masters do nothing to facilitate young people’s opportunities for education ( unless they enlist of course).
However now there are so many obstacles which prevent upward mobility such as the slow death of manufacturing and the disappearance of jobs locally because of outsourcing to cheaper options overseas ( India and the Philippines here in Oz).
Not everyone made it. Those who got pregnant early took a detour into a multigenerational poverty cycle. Those whose parents prioritized money (usually by becoming workaholics) grew up without any raising, and tended to wind up on drugs, in gangs, or both. Some went to prison.
It seems to make a huge difference if there is a parent, grandparent, uncle, or even community leader who is watching over the kid to encourage, scold, ask questions, be interested, challenge them to stretch for more... So many of our kids went to bottom level schools, ones that lost or were on the verge of losing accreditation, even. Some climbed out of them through magnet programs or scholarships. Some stayed in them and worked their asses off. But they had families that prized education as their ticket to a better life--however dysfunctional they might be in a ton of other ways.
But I think that personal contact is necessary. I doubt a program can take its place. As missionaries, we prioritized education, did all that we could to teach English, correct homework, finagle kids into scholarship programs, and if nothing else, fix them with a gimlet eye and demand to know how their studies were going. Even the kids with absent and severely mentally disturbed parents did far better than anyone would expect from their home life, given that contact. But we maxed out at several thousand people in terms of who we could effectively reach over the course of say, twenty years. Just spread too thin. We need more people.
About 20 years ago our local church district mission exec was pushing very hard for us to develop a "rancher" mentality, not a shepherd's view, as he put it. He thought the stuff I describe above was too labor-intensive. And so it is. But it's got to be done, and all too often nobody else is doing it. In a best-case scenario, you train others to do this sort of thing as well. But somebody has to take responsibility for watching over the whole thing, or else people fall between the cracks. A month or so after we got pushed out of our old parish (long story, involving a power hungry sociopath, meh), we heard that a man had died in his apartment and gone undiscovered for weeks. His wife was away visiting family in Vietnam. This never would have happened if we'd still been there, as we paid attention to these things and would have been calling regularly.
Pardon my ignorance about Appalachia, and I know I have a grab bag of info from documentaries, stereotypes, fictional portrayals, and folklore about what it's like there.
So I'm asking: Do the people who've lived there all their lives, and not gone off to cities for work, want the roads, airports, and broadband? Would that help them stay in Appalachia (if that's what they want), rather than trekking off to cities?
From what I've heard, over the years, about various places around the world where the younger people move away to get work and new/different opportunities, it can be devastating for the communities back home. OTOH, it sometimes seems to work for some individuals who go away, but can also mean they're unrooted and culturally displaced.
Thx.
That was true of the church I came from - 10s of young people of my generation moved away, only one stayed. And it is true of my church now - the successful children of Caribbean immigrants have moved away, and the parents are dying out. The area itself seems to be doing OK (less prostitution, less gun crime) partly as the stigma of council housing has decreased as the problem of getting housed anywhere at all has grown, but the incomers - wealthier white people in private housing, and muslim Somalis on the estate - are two separate groups, neither of whom we intersect with. Strange times.
There is a bit of ‘Auntie May’s steps’ (thanks LC) going on but it’s disjointed and not really part of an outreach or a community. Many wouldn’t be bothered by that, but I think I am.
People in Appalachia want to earn a ,living; they want jobs. The closing of many coal mines and the blight that killed off the chestnut trees wiped out the two major industries. It is vital that new industries come in, but with such poor infrastructures no business will settle there.
Aside from that the locals would enjoy better roads.
We hear the words "levelling up" a lot but that is what is so desperately needed and I think schools could be - ought to be - the key.
Going back to my own childhood in a state primary there were a few things that made life not only easier for poorer parents but which levelled things for their children. Two which spring to mind were the school medical and dental services. Yes, for those of us who came from families that trooped off to the dentist twice a year it could be a bore, but for some of my classmates it was their only chance to have their teeth checked (and be provided with toothbrushes and toothpaste), their eyesight tested and be sent to the optician (who also came into school) and prescription glasses issued.
It was also the case that every child ate school lunch; most of us paid the nominal charge but a grant from the local church ensured that children from poorer families got lunch free, ditto for swimming lessons.
With few exceptions the people who make our laws and interpret how they should be applied - in other words MPs and senior civil servants) - have little or no direct experience of the many differences in the lives of children from poorer families compared to our own. Worse, they seem disinclined to believe how lack of a decent wage impacts on the most basic areas of life.
At the moment much is made of poorer children not having access to computers for home learning, but little is heard about the cost of downloading for families on Pay-as-you-go. It's not enough to just provide the laptop, they need to be able to access the teaching materials. Another problem is space. In a poorer household children frequently don't have anywhere to do homework uninterrupted: modern housing design makes this worse and social housing rules dependent on children sharing bedrooms actively prevent many children from having anywhere to work or even keep their own things.
How can churches help? By forgetting about "promoting a Christian ethos in the school" (to quote the brochure from a CofE academy near me) and actually providing, or funding the provision of, what is actually needed.
- wraparound provision through free breakfast and after-school clubs
- supervised homework sessions
- keep-up with your child free IT sessions for parents
- holiday clubs at half-terms, Easter and summer holidays
- evening clubs for secondary level, especially drama and typical youth club activities.
Should government do all of this - of course, but keeping it local is going to be far more flexible and capable of responding to real, rather than perceived, need.
When I was in secondary and primary schools that did provide much of this, it was provided by the learning mentors, librarian and learning support assistants - certainly the breakfast, lunchtime and after-school clubs that weren't sport or for a production, more for homework and youth club activities. Those extra people are getting rarer as school cuts bite and there is no money to pay them.
I also have been involved in holiday clubs on school sites, in a farming community when most of the children wouldn't get away as it was a busy time of year, and we wanted them to have some experiences to write about in the inevitable start of term essay. The school planned maintenance over the summer break, so we were only allowed in for a couple of weeks at the beginning, if that.
The other version was a half term church initiative aimed at recruiting kids into the local churches - very heavy handedly. Popular with the parents as keeping kids off the streets for not much money, not so good for the kids' behaviour.
Learning mentors are known to help. Basically eyes on kids that need it, trying to problem solve the issues that are making it hard for them to learn - like for one permanently late lad, arranging for the younger sibling he was taking to school to attend breakfast club, so he could drop that sister off earlier and arrive on time. But you have to build trust to get the information to help, and access to funding. Those learning mentors worked in a cluster of feeder primary and secondary schools in a deprived area with Excellence in Cities (link) funding to meet those needs. That funding stream dried up years ago.
Definitely none of these things to be seen as "opportunity for mission" or anything along those lines. The most successful youth groups I've been involved with were church-based but were all to do with the church funding but standing back.
That a moribund local economy impacts on community seems beyond question. Depressed economy tends to depress people. What about the other direction ? Does strengthening community lead to economic recovery ?
You sometimes hear people reminisce about how we were all poor as church mice but we had good neighbours and never had to lock our doors... Is that all moonshine ?
I'm wondering if this will change in some business sectors. The big tech companies are looking at letting a fair number of their employees work from home after the pandemic is over, as they would then not have to pay for office space, plus some people really like it. Wouldn't some of those folks prefer to live outside of big cities?
Some of them would, sure. Others would still be drawn to the greater leisure and socialising opportunities provided by the big cities.
Fixed quoting code. BroJames, Purgatory Host
It would be convenient if the job were more portable, allowing them to live in more congenial conditions without a horrendous commute; smaller rural communities could make this a competitive advantage.
I live in suburbia. Most of my younger colleagues choose to live in/near the city, and commute out to work, because they like the city attractions. Most of the people with families live in suburbia; a small number prefer to live out in the more rural areas and drive in.
Where would I live if I could work remotely all the time? I'd still want to live near interesting people, because I'd want to make interesting friends. That would probably drive me to some kind of suburb - cities are too crowded for me, and although I appreciate a number of attractive, less populated areas, they probably don't have enough population to have a decent chance of containing people with interests that match mine.
I can imagine our collective, enforced trial by Zoom changing that a bit. For instance, a diocesan Men’s group which meets weekly or biweekly on Zoom and maybe every other month in person, if you can deal with the drive - sounds like a go-er to me. The small group I am part of looks like it will move in that direction and has grown, internationally !!, during the last year.
Some Americans have moved to Hawai'i, during the pandemic, so they can work remotely in a beautiful place. Hawai'i has been encouraging it.
(Not to detour the convo: I've sometimes wondered if remote work might be helpful for residents of a certain unofficial country in the Middle East. I don't know if they're already doing it; but if they could get good, consistent Internet access, remote work might boost their lives and their economy. Of course, privacy would be a major issue, as well as possible interference with Web access.
/End non-detour.)
But what a successful outcome looks like will depend on whether a town / area is actually viable. A town that relied on an exhausted coal seam at the end of a long, winding road probably isn't viable, except perhaps as a much smaller town or village. Jobs will get scarce, younger people and families will move away, community amnities will dry up, churches will close, traditions will be lost, and I would think government's appropriate role is simply to manage that decline without too many jolts. Trying to prevent decline with too many initiatives would simply mean a crash when a subsequent government runs out of patience and decides not to throw any more good money after bad.
NB: I think talk of different working / living patterns post covid may be overstated. I'm in NZ, we haven't been locked down since May, and as far as I can tell life is very much like it was before covid, ie, people commute to work just like before. Prices in rural areas around my city are increasing, but only because prices in the city itself are becoming absurd and the best financial strategy is to buy as big a plot in the country as you can and let the value increase.
With few exceptions the people who make our laws and interpret how they should be applied - in other words MPs and senior civil servants) - have little or no direct experience of the many differences in the lives of children from poorer families compared to our own. Worse, they seem disinclined to believe how lack of a decent wage impacts on the most basic areas of life.
This is it, exactly.
Also, if you are a young woman of average intelligence who, despite being reasonably diligent and attentive at school, got a poor quality education in a class blighted by a small minority of disruptive pupils, and left school with a bare minimum of qualifications, what do you do? There are minimum wage jobs available, as a cleaner, or shop assistant, or in a kitchen, but they don't pay enough to enable dreams or ambitions. The route to adult status is through getting a boyfriend and having a baby. Delaying motherhood isn't going to result in any tangible benefit such as a degree, or travel, or the deposit on a house.
Create opportunities for girls, make delaying motherhood an attractive prospect, with tangible benefits, or create opportunities which include quality childcare for young mothers to go to college and gain qualifications.
There's a circular problem - if you google "lowest paid jobs" they tend to be jobs that women do. Even if girls do go to college and qualify as e.g. a hairdresser, beautician, or nursery nurse, they'll still be earning the national minimum wage, or not much more. These careers only result in high wages for those in a position to own the salon, or nursery. We need to stop funneling young women into jobs that still make young motherhood an understandable and logical choice.
People were doing that here during and for a period after lockdown, but that talk has gone away.
Eventually each block of flats was given a Concierge office and the maisonettes were demolished to be replaced by brand new terraced houses with gardens . Crime and anti social behaviour plummeted.
Fixed broken link, I think. BroJames, Purgatory Host
A lot of people have re-arranged their lives around this, and have probably found some things that they’d just as soon not go back to. And I expect the virus is going to be with us for at least many months to come.
I left school with, I think, 9 O levels/top CSEs. I wanted to be a teacher but I was not allowed to go on to college to do A levels and a degree was beyond my aspirations anyway; I didn’t know anyone who went to university. Even those of my peers allowed to do A levels went on to apprenticeships not degrees. My parents expected us to start work and pay rent. Only one of my 7 siblings went to college and she trained there as a nursery nurse. The rest were factory or shop workers and one sister was pregnant at 17. My visually impaired twin became a groom at a riding stables via a youth training scheme and still works there over 30 years later.
I went on a youth training scheme in a small private care home in nearby Dunstable and it was that experience that changed my life. The two owners were middle aged, middle class women (a nurse and someone who had taught life skills to teenage mothers) with daughters my age at college. They had expected their first trainee to be a girl without qualifications and were shocked that I was not in college. It was them who encouraged me to train as a nurse and supported my application (it only needed 5 O levels in those days). I went on to become a specialist nurse practitioner and then university lecturer, I have 2 degrees and a Masters in Education thanks to the Open University, and am currently doing a doctorate while in my 50s. I use my case study when teaching my students about the importance of social and cultural capital for children and young people.
Yes, London docklands faced some of the issues - dealing with abandoned and derelict industrial remains. But if docklands had been green fields it would have been snapped up for development years earlier.
The sort of places I'm thing of, if they didn't exist it would be unnecessary to invent them. Towns whose reason for existence - mining, shipbuilding, Victorian seaside holidays, whatever - isn't there any more.
Seems to me that there are sectors of the economy which are genuinely footloose- not necessarily tied to any particular location. Government agencies that never meet their customers/clients/victims face-to-face, data centres, universities. So any town is viable if it gets enough of these.
But neither private enterprise, civil servants nor academics want to locate somewhere unattractive...
The textile industry (and cotton slavery) created Manchester, and an engineering industry grew up on textile machinery and then diversified. All gone now, but apparently we are more wealthy than ever before. I have no idea whatsoever what all these people do. They sure as hell don't make anything.
T%her are very few jobs where you can work remotely without broadband.