Larry
Swanson in Montana’s booming Bitterroot Valley, where he’s
studying the impact of past and present growth on agricultural
lands. Mike Greener
Name Larry Swanson
Vocation Economist and demographer
Age 55
Home Base Center for the Rocky Mountain West, Missoula,
Mont.
Known for Hair-raising presentations about dramatic
shifts in Mountain West demography and economics.
He says "We can’t successfully adapt to change
without a fuller understanding of it. Good people with good
information make good decisions."
Larry Swanson’s office overlooking the Clark Fork River in
Missoula suffers from a severe case of paper piling. No surface is
spared, including the floor.
Swanson is a man with a mission: keeping the rural West alive.
Why bother with excessive housekeeping?
An economist and demographer at the University of Montana’s
Center for the Rocky Mountain West, Swanson creates easy-to-read
demographic charts documenting the dramatic population shifts from
rural areas to urban. Those shifts have left large swaths of the
West with dwindling populations and impoverished agricultural areas.
This is familiar territory for Swanson, who grew up on a 700-acre
farm in Nebraska, and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the decline of
the rural Plains. During the 1970s, he directed the Great Plains
Office of Policy Studies at the University of Nebraska. He watched
farm groups and academics perform "rain dances to ideology," arguing
for price supports and tax provisions that, in the end, only skewed
the economics of farming and hastened the decline of family farms.
The fallout continues today; from 2000 to 2005, 83 out of 93
counties in Nebraska lost population.
It’s a gritty civics lesson that stays with Swanson as he
watches small Rocky Mountain communities struggle for survival.
Roughly half the counties in Montana and Wyoming are losing people;
all but a handful face declining school enrollment. And it’s not
just happening out on the Plains; many below-the-real-estate-radar
mountain communities are withering as well.
Swanson blames the persistent ideology that rejects new people
and ideas, puts quantity over quality, and expects the federal
government to keep rural economies afloat. So he travels the
Northern Rockies preaching pragmatism. Most isolated rural areas are
doomed to decline, he says, what with land and resources
increasingly in the hands of wealthy estate owners and corporate
farm producers, and young people leaving in search of better
opportunities. At the same time, however, Swanson sees "areas of
hope": small cities like Helena, Idaho Falls and Billings that are
building new economies on top of the old and attracting a younger
generation.
Growing
Area Dependence on Non-Employment Income Sources. Center for
the Rocky Mountain
West/www.crmw.org
The most
successful towns, he says, are developing industries that cater to
an aging and wealthy population: health care, finance, architecture
and marketing. Maverick Marketing of Hamilton, Mont., for example,
has "clients all over the country," he says. Other
communities are capitalizing on the freedom provided by the
Internet: Swanson points to Philipsburg, Mont., whose 959 residents
live little more than a stone’s throw from the Anaconda mining
pits. Their small town is now home to a company called Vote Smart, a
political research center dedicated to candidate accountability.
Plenty of young people want to live in the scenic West, Swanson
says, and "undiscovered" small cities offer the advantage
of comparatively lower-cost housing. In hopping towns like Missoula
and Bozeman, or in Sheridan, Wyo., "Kids are trying to buy into
their parents’ housing market. Well, they can’t do it," he
says. "But a house in Boise that goes for $450,000 goes for
$200,000 or less in places in Montana."
Swanson also has advice for towns that are currently booming:
"Don’t assume that the growth will last." Growth creates
jobs in construction and minimum-wage services, but it’s
temporary, he says, not something to build a future on. Community
leaders need to see growth as the bridge to the next economy; they
should concentrate on training workers and incubating businesses
that will carry the community forward even after the growth bubble
bursts.
In the end, Swanson believes that Westerners need to find local
solutions, ones that will put them on top of this "new
economy" rather than at the bottom. "Globalization makes
us feel inconsequential," he says. But focusing and acting on
the community’s strengths — and future strengths — helps
people overcome long-held feelings of helplessness.
The author writes about the West from Sheridan, Wyo.
