Zócalo is celebrating its 20th birthday! As part of the festivities, we’re publishing reflections and responses that revisit and reimagine some of our most impactful stories and public programs. Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews revisits Southern California author D.J. Waldie’s 2012 essay “The Darkness Behind Huell Howser” and considers why, over a decade after Howser’s death, the public TV’s great California chronicler retains such a hold on us.

“Do you know Huell Howser?”

I got that question recently while chatting with a counter guy at Erick Schat’s Bakery, which produces Dutch pastries and sheepherder bread in the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop.

It’s a question I get at least a couple times a year, in all different corners of California.

I suppose it’s a natural question. People might wonder if I, a longtime chronicler of California’s places, get asked if I know the public television reporter who took viewers into every little town and restaurant and museum, from Alturas to Zzyzx.

It’s a question that never ceases to amaze me. Or stump me.

Because the truth is that I can’t possibly know Huell Howser. And not just because I only met him a couple times. No one can possibly know Huell Howser anymore, because Huell Howser died 11 years ago, of prostate cancer, at age 67.

But the truth is also that people feel like they do know Huell Howser. Because he never really left us. His shows still air regularly on public TV stations in Southern California. And episodes of his California-exploring series—California’s Gold, California’s Green, Downtown, Road Trip with Huell Howser, and Visiting—still attract heavy traffic online.

Why does Huell Howser retain such a hold on us? The best answer to that question came from the Southern California author D.J. Waldie, in a Zócalo Public Square essay published shortly before Howser’s January 2013 death.

Waldie’s thesis was that Howser, in taking viewers to forgettable eateries and little-known places, was finding joy in the thing that Californians most cherish: our broken dreams.

Most people come to California, or grow up in California, dreaming of stardom or riches or invention or new and distinctive lifestyles. Instead, they end up sewing dresses in a little store in Tustin, or working at a dairy outside Turlock. You can feel pretty small doing that kind of work. But when Howser showed up, the public TV explorer in all his geeky ebullience, it made the life you settled for seem big.

“Howser wasn’t just pitching the muchness of California, an abundance anyone should be able to see unaided,” Waldie wrote. “He was pitching the almost infinite otherness within the ordinary of California, particularly when California is considered with joy.”

Waldie wrote that Howser’s deep connection with the regular “folks” of California was not his joy but “the melancholy behind his fierce public niceness.” His TV tours could strike sad notes, especially when his questions revealed wonderful old things that no longer existed. The same relentless dynamism that produces the many wonders of California also destroys the established. Our sunny love of the novel coexists with darkness and loss.

Howser liked to say that his goal was to encourage Californians to embark on their own personal adventures around the state, and investigate the places all around them. Howser modeled that kind of exploration, with a curiosity about everything that showed how fiercely unprejudiced he was.

As Waldie wrote, Howser was not urging Californians to take “a harmless field trip” but rather to begin “an encounter with the differences that reside, intractable, in everyday life—real differences between people, conditions, ethnicities, and cultures that can only be accepted for what they are and mostly with a smile.”

I don’t look or sound like Howser—he was a handsome TV guy with the distinctive accent of his native Tennessee, while I’m a rumpled print guy and fourth-generation Californian. But I suspect I get the “Do you know Huell Howser?” question because my reporting method is so similar to his.

That method: modestly planned, thoroughly unrehearsed wandering—which also happens to be the most practical way to get to know California.

Because Californians are so informal and so flaky (as anyone who has ever invited people to a dinner party knows), I rarely bother to schedule a bunch of interviews in advance when I’m visiting a town. It works much better to show up unannounced, act friendly, and start asking respectful questions about what people do.

I also say, as Howser did, “wow” and “gee whiz” when people are showing me things—a rusting old motorbike, a piece of street art, a loaf of bread—that would seem less than amazing to someone less geekily Californian.

There is no greater flattery in the Golden State than to take an interest in what others do. Californians, whatever their occupation, are instinctive artists, and asking them about their business or their home or their flea market—as Howser did—often elicits detailed and thoughtful responses.

That’s what I was doing at Schat’s. I had been pressing the counter guy. What is that bread? Can I try a piece? What makes it taste so good?

His answer to my last question was perfect: The best bread comes from the baker most determined to make sure you never forget it.

The post Huell Howser Lives! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mount Shasta, California, and Ashland, Oregon did it right. Located in the California–Oregon border region where I live, they avoided economic devastation by having their survival plans well underway by the time their lumber mills began to shut down more than a half century ago.

Indeed, Mount Shasta was more than 100 years ahead of the curve thanks to a guy named Justin Hinckley Sisson, who planted the seeds for the town’s future reinvention as a recreational tourist destination. A schoolteacher from Connecticut, Sisson moved out West and reinvented himself as a rugged outdoorsman. In 1866 he opened a hotel and restaurant on the lower slopes of Mount Shasta and started taking his visitors on hunting, fishing, and mountain climbing excursions.

The timber boom that had begun around that time had pretty well petered out by 1990, when the last lumber mill closed in Mount Shasta.

By then, a wave of newcomers attracted to the recreational opportunities in the area had taken up where Sisson left off, setting up outfitting stores and offering guide services. A new ski park opened in 1985. All this was complemented by a new batch of motels and restaurants. Beginning in the late 1990s a nonprofit organization called the Mount Shasta Trail Association, fueled by grants and private donations, greatly expanded the area’s hiking opportunities, adding 20 miles of trails along lakes and rivers and on the slopes of Mount Shasta, with another 46 miles currently in the works. All in all, it added up to a smooth and vigorous transition from a timber-based economy to one based on recreational tourism.

Seventy-five miles up the road sits another former timber town, Ashland, Oregon. The last of its eight lumber mills shut down in 1967. But an English professor at the local college, Angus L. Bowmer, had already planted the seeds for the town’s reinvention. Bowmer had done some amateur acting on the side, and he got the idea of converting an unused structure in the city park into a venue for Shakespearean plays. The city of Ashland offered him $400 and funds for a construction crew—just enough support to get his project off the ground.

The first two productions occurred in 1935 and became an annual event: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. By the 1960s the festival had established Ashland as a major theatre town that drew fans of the Bard from up and down the West Coast. By 2019 the Ashland Chamber of Commerce estimated that over 100,000 visitors were showing up at the theatre festival each season. Its success has spawned a number of other live theatre venues.

What do these two successful town reinventions have in common? They both carry the promise that visitors to the town will leave their drab, boring lives behind and find something new and exciting.

A successful reinvention is a high tide that raises all boats, attracts that surge of hikers and skiers and theatre-goers who fill the hotels and restaurants and keep the cash registers in the retail shops humming.

But what happens when the tide doesn’t roll in?

The small town where I live, Dunsmuir, California, provides an example of what happens when you don’t have a plan B. Dunsmuir is just 10 miles down the road from Mount Shasta. In its heyday Dunsmuir was a thriving railroad hub for passenger trains, equipment repair, and crew changes. Ten passenger trains came through every day, but now most of that has gone away. It’s down to two passenger trains each day, and freight train crews are less than half what they were in the days of steam locomotives.

There was no plan B in place before, or during, the railroad’s decline. So now, more than half a century later, well-intentioned people here are playing catchup, trying to bring the town back to life, but through piecemeal efforts: a new art gallery, a small performing space, a microbrewery, some pretty good restaurants.

None of this adds up to a solid rebranding. The town has shrunk from 2,200 in population when I moved here 26 years ago, to 1,700 today. This is despite a number of elements in Dunsmuir’s favor: the Sacramento River runs right through Dunsmuir. It’s considered one of the best flyfishing destinations in California. Hiking trails abound, and the slopes of Mount Shasta and the ski park are a short drive away.

But new enterprises tend to come and go at a high turnover rate, like the outfitting store that only lasted a couple of months. An entrepreneur from Oakland, who’d made a bundle selling novelty items in China, bought up a half dozen downtown properties 20 years ago and promised that it would be the beginning of the town’s revival. Those buildings still sit empty. It’s tough to get a plan B going in a depressed economy.

In their book, Our Towns, the journalists James and Deborah Fallows found common factors in successfully reinvented towns across the United States. Among them was an openness to newcomers, to new people bringing new talents and ideas to their new homes. In these “open” towns the newcomers often find opportunities to reinvent themselves, to apply whatever skills and talents they may have in new ways in this new, stimulating environment. The retired accountant who made his own beer at home opens a microbrewery. Or the English professor gets into the theatre business. Or that Connecticut schoolteacher opens a hotel and starts taking his visitors on hunting and fishing excursions.

In Dunsmuir we see similar personal transformations that could plant the seeds for a successful town reinvention: A former stock and bond trader from the Bay Area took over the flyfishing shop. A former bank executive from San Francisco runs the hardware store.

Every small town has its share of talented, enterprising folks, the ones who get the art galleries and the microbreweries going. But they can’t do it alone. They need visitors and ideas from elsewhere. And people need to direct their positive energy and talent in the same direction, and come up with a theme, a story for their town to tell. Otherwise, they’re likely to have a nice, quiet town with a lot of empty storefronts.

The post If Small Towns Want to Survive, They Need a Plan B appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That question occurred to me on a recent visit to Independence, California, a settlement of 600 people on U.S. 395, south of Bishop and north of Lone Pine in the windswept Owens Valley.

Spending the day on the streets of Independence, in the shadows of Mt. Williamson and other Eastern Sierra peaks, got me thinking about how much we talk about independence, and how little we cherish independence as a value.

While Independence is the sort of rural, out-of-the-way place that in the American and Californian imagination should embody our ideals of independence, there is very little that’s independent about Independence. Or about us.

Independence isn’t even its own municipality. It’s an unincorporated town—officially, a U.S. Census-designated place. Unincorporated towns don’t have their own city governments, and their people live at the whims of higher levels of government, which may or may not provide basic services. Independence neighborhoods, for example, don’t have sidewalks.

There also isn’t much business. When I visited, local cafes were closed, and the hotel-restaurant across the street from the courthouse was for sale. When I asked what was new in town, I kept getting the same answer: The Subway sandwich shop next to a gas station had been replaced by a smaller, Nevada-based chain, Port of Subs.

Independence is the seat of Inyo County, which helps keep the place alive. The county is a vital employer—between the county courthouse, the county administration, and the county jail on the south edge of town. Like so many rural communities, Independence is also dependent to a great degree on the federal and state governments. The feds manage or own more than one-third of the land in the area, via the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Forest Service, and the National Park Service. The state of California controls another 15 percent of the land. Independence depends very much on the protection of Cal Fire, with a summer of wildfires already underway.

But the biggest outside landowner in the area, with nearly half of the managed land, is the L.A. Department of Water and Power. L.A., in an unforgettable act of deception and treachery, bought up much of the Owens Valley to obtain water for the city in the early 20th century. Today, LADWP manages state-owned lands to control for dust in the Owens Lake, now mostly dry since L.A. took much of its water. DWP trucks are visible around town, and their facilities occupy multiple blocks west of 395. All this means Independence is peculiarly dependent on a city government over 200 miles away from it.

Around the corner from the LADWP buildings is Independence’s greatest public attraction, the Eastern California Museum. But inside this marvel of local history is an origin story rooted in dependence.

The name Independence was imposed by the U.S. military, which established Camp Independence in this valley back on July 4, 1862. In that period, the U.S. Army was not protecting anyone’s independence in California; it was making sure the new state stayed in the Union, while fighting and killing local Indigenous people in campaigns that, according to recent scholarship, amounted to genocide.

That history sat with me when I drove six miles south of town to visit another example of the American government’s approach to this part of California: Manzanar, the World War II incarceration camp for people of Japanese ancestry. The wind never stopped howling as I completed the three-mile loop through the camp, peering at old barracks and reflecting on the insatiable hunger of the United States to imprison its own people and—again in recent years—those who try to migrate here.

Did we stop believing in independence? Or did we ever really believe in it to begin with?

Perhaps we’d be better off giving up on glorifying independence as an American value. The 21st century is all about interdependence instead. We’ve needed one another to survive the pandemic, as our governments proved unable to prevent mass deaths. It seems certain that we’ll need to do the same to save ourselves from climate change. In a country as rough as ours, to be independent is to risk isolation and worse.

“Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land,” wrote the Independence-based writer Mary Austin in her 1903 book about the region, The Land of Little Rain, “you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.”

Today, a large plaque hangs from Austin’s former house on Market Street. As I read it, I wondered: why not call the 4th Solidarity Day? After all, it’s a holiday where we don’t behave independently. Instead, we act collectively, performing the same rituals of barbecues, parades, and fireworks all across the country.

Would we even miss Independence Day if we redefined it? After all, independence is dangerous these days. Americans spend considerable energy pressuring one another to be loyal team members—and not stray from our political, cultural, or corporate tribes. Independent thought, expression or action is likely to get you fired, sued, or severely ostracized.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives, our social movements, and our non-profits spend much of their time cozying up to the wealthy people and institutions that fund them. Talk of revolution and rebellion has been relegated to the fringes.

All that said, Independence Day hasn’t been canceled, at least not yet. The unincorporated town of Independence is organizing a fabulous Fourth of July, including closing down 395 to hold a big parade. There will be fun and games and food. You could call it a celebration of our country’s birthday. Or you could call it a celebration of the birthday of Independence, California.

Just don’t call it a celebration of independence. Because neither you nor anyone else believe in that anymore.

The post Is Independence Still Worth Celebrating? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Would it be a population of about 30,000? By that definition, two of the three local leaders on the panel—former West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon and Coachella councilmember Megan Beaman Jacinto—live in communities of approximately 50,000, and would not qualify.

Gonzales city manager René Mendez, whose Central Coast town has a population of just 9,000, said that more important than a number is the necessity of fostering “connections and intimacy” among the people who live there. Though he’d be hard-pressed to consider a community of 30,000 a small town, he said, a town or city with a population the size of West Sacramento and Coachella can still feel intimate—and thus, by that definition, be a “small town.”

Jacinto and Cabaldon agreed that the “small town” designation is relative, noting that it depends where you are. Hewing closer to Mendez’s definition, Cabaldon said that you know you’re in a small town if a fellow resident comes to a city council meeting and you know them not from the organization that they’re representing but because of a different relationship—through something like school or church or the neighborhood.

Marcum, the moderator, quoted Aristotle, who considered a place the right size if “the citizens should know each other and know what kind of people they are.” Turning to Mendez, she asked, “Does Gonzales meet that criteria?”

Unequivocally, “yes,” Mendez replied. The city even refers to its way of doing things as “the Gonzales way,” which he clarified, “doesn’t mean you always agree, just that you’re together, and you’re able to work through some issues.” That comes with downsides, too. For instance, Mendez was working to unveil a new multifamily housing project. A week before its unveiling, the community came out against it—with friends, relatives, and teachers all reaching out directly with unanticipated concerns. “It was a very uncomfortable conversation, but we worked through it,” he said, one that was discussed with emotion everywhere from the liquor store to the barber shop to the post office.

Cabaldon noted that West Sacramento—which nearly doubled in size over his two decades in office—wants “to be a small-town vibe with big-city amenities.” The challenge he found was that “the interconnectedness that we feel isn’t always completely real.” It can be easy to go to certain places and meetings and think you’ll see everyone, but then you miss communities within the community. “I wasn’t really running into recent immigrants from Laos, folks from the Ukrainian community,” he recalled.

This is the similar to one of the challenges facing Coachella, which is currently about 97 percent Latino. The city has doubled in population over the past 15 years and continues to grow, which makes for challenging city planning, said Jacinto. “There is a way of thinking in Coachella—that I share to some extent—which is, as we develop Coachella into the future, we want to ensure that it’s preserving spaces and culture and history for the people that live there now,” she said. “At the same time, about 70 percent of our city is undeveloped, so to speak, agricultural land that’s really ripe for development.” This land could mean opportunities—or challenges that push residents out. Neighbors hold different possible futures for the city in many directions, from the wealthier, larger cities of Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage, and Palm Springs to the working-class neighborhoods of incorporated communities in the more rural eastern Coachella Valley. “We have to be really careful in balancing [our] thoughts and dreams,” said Jacinto.

Turning to Cabaldon, Marcum asked, “Did [West Sacramento] want to be Sacramento, or did it always say, we want to keep an identity as a separate thing that we are?”

Both, said Cabaldon—residents wanted amenities and improvements, but they also didn’t want change. “Very few small towns want to grow just to grow,” he said. Regarding neighboring Sacramento, he noted that anyone who wanted to move there could, but as a politician, he got to have the best of both worlds. “I can draft behind the big cities when it matters and focus on maintaining and building out a small-town place,” he said. If you want to do something, even about a problem as big as climate change, you can open your office door and yell to your colleagues and make a plan. Which isn’t to say small towns are perfect. He joked that you could also have a situation where, say, there are four city councilmembers total—and one hates another because he stole his high school prom date. (When asked if this was a true story, Cabaldon laughed and said he was not referring to the current city council.)

“You don’t have to go through a lot of hoops to get something done,” Mendez joined in, speaking to a plus of small-town governance. “The key is to have partnerships.” In Gonzales, the youth council galvanized the community to figure out how to help young people facing mental health issues during the pandemic. Acting on the recommendations of these local teenagers, he said, the city council and school board came together to create a wraparound mental health approach and fund a social worker to support young people in crisis.

On the other end of the spectrum, small communities are often under-resourced and underrepresented in government. “Can you talk about how small is maybe too small and what the challenges there are?” asked Marcum.

In addition to working within Coachella, Jacinto advocates for unincorporated communities in the eastern rural Coachella Valley. These places, which exist primarily because farmworkers couldn’t find affordable housing elsewhere, lack basic resources like clean drinking water and septic systems. They’ve been forced to innovate, developing some of the state’s first point-of-use community water filtration systems and new regulations for mobile home utilities.

Small size necessitates and often facilitates innovation, the panelists agreed. Gonzales recently made universal broadband free to all its residents, and West Sacramento instituted universal preschool 18 years ago and has made free college tuition possible for every high school senior.

“In a smaller town you can imagine actually solving a problem,” said Cabaldon. “In a bigger city, it’s, ‘Let’s adopt a 25-year plan to do X.’” Small-town leaders know they can’t leave anyone behind, he joked, because you might run into that person at a soccer game next weekend.

Marcum then turned the discussion over to audience questions, submitted via a live YouTube chat.

One person wanted to know: How can you create a cultural center for a town?

Mendez said it’s about watching where your community gathers and what places they revolve around. “It’s observing your community, listening, and then you try to activate around that,” he said. In Gonzales, for example, they passed a sales tax to fund a new community center near the school—because it was identified as a place where people were already going.

Another viewer asked: What was the most innovative thing the panelists had seen come out of a small town?

Jacinto said that Coachella was “the first city in the nation to ban private prisons” and also the only place that instituted “hazard hero pay for farmworkers” in the pandemic—an extra $4 an hour for four months.

Viewers also wanted to know how to keep and attract young people to small towns. Creating extension campuses of larger higher educational institutions, said Mendez and Cabaldon, has been helpful.

Listening to the panelists discuss the reasons why people want to come or return to small towns, Marcum noted near the end of the discussion that it felt like the panelists were covering the things that make life good. Summing it up, she said: “You need basic necessities, you need opportunity that makes your children come home, you need fun, you need a place to live, and you need a place where everybody meets.”

The post Small Towns Can Create Big Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But will she stay? It’s no idyll. The housing she was promised is in disrepair, and the old town doctor feels threatened by her presence. And while sparks fly with the hunky Marine veteran who owns the only local bar, Mel finds that she can’t escape the loneliness, drugs, violence, economic struggle, and health care problems of L.A. All those same problems are present in rural California, too.

Don’t bother looking for Virgin River on any map. The town is the literary invention of the romance novelist Robyn Carr, who has made it the fictional setting for 20 novels that have sold more than 13 million copies since 2007. A 21st book arrives this fall.

I’m not the intended customer of the romance genre, but early in the COVID-19 lockdown, I started watching the recent Netflix adaptation of Virgin River. Despite the predictable plots and plodding dialogue, I couldn’t stop watching—Virgin River offers an intriguingly unconventional portrayal of a part of California that few Californians have seen with their own eyes. I find myself thinking even more about the show now, as the uprising against police violence spreads quickly from cities to rural settlements the size of Virgin River.

While the geography of Carr’s novels and the Netflix series are vague, Virgin River appears to be in a remote county which has no incorporated municipalities and sits among the rivers, trees, and mountains between coastal Eureka and inland Redding. The place best fitting that description is Trinity County, population just 13,000, and one of only four California counties that are considered fully rural. (Definitions of “rural” vary, but the U.S. Census defines rural as anything not urban, and defines urban as any cluster of at least 2,500 people.)

In California, America’s most urbanized state, this is a fraught but important time to think about places like Trinity County and Virgin River. All too often, Golden State urbanites ignore or demonize remote communities when we should embrace them as partners in addressing our state’s most serious problems.

Today’s conventional wisdom is that the Golden State, and the whole country, really, are badly divided between two different universes: the rural and the urban. Political narratives dwell on the alleged chasm between our bluer giant urban regions and our redder lightly populated places. Those narratives both polarize us (by exaggerating conflict and emboldening white racists to claim rural victimhood) and weaken democracy (by spreading the toxic idea that the country can’t be governed because it is just too divided).

Under COVID, our media has been obsessed with the differences between how more urban and more rural counties responded to the pandemic. Gov. Gavin Newsom, under pressure from the political right for not recognizing the purportedly different realities in rural counties, abandoned his statewide shelter-in-place in favor of a localized, county-by-county approach.

Political and media stories of rural-urban divide may keep audiences engaged and riled up. But these narratives so badly exaggerate the differences between small and large California that they constitute a dangerous form of misrepresentation. To the contrary, data and experience teach us that rural and urban California are remarkably similar, particularly in the challenges they face.

And on this highly relevant point, the romance novels about Virgin River—for all their clichés—understand California far better than most Californians do.

The Virgin River novels, like the television series, are all about the union of urban and rural. In most of Carr’s books, a struggling person—usually a middle-class professional from a bigger California city—ends up in Virgin River, looking for escape or healing. Most but not all are women. Among them are a Sacramento prosecutor, who was nearly killed by a criminal; a twice-divorced LAPD officer who was shot in the line of duty; a San Francisco sous-chef whose career has collapsed; a Silicon Valley public relations warrior who got burned out; Native American rancher from the urbanizing Inland Empire.

In Virgin River, their experiences are invariably mixed. On the plus side, these Virgin River arrivals always seem to find attractive local residents with military experience—Carr started writing romance novels four decades ago as an Air Force wife—and talents for heterosexual lovemaking. On the other hand, the new arrivals all must adjust to their disappointment that Virgin River, for all its natural beauty, can be just as difficult as the urban environments they left behind.

The plots emphasize domestic violence, post-traumatic stress, environmental damage, housing access, America’s healthcare failings, and the challenges of addiction, business practices, and criminality surrounding the area’s growing marijuana industry. Virgin River is mostly white, but there is growing racial and ethnic diversity, just like in the real rural California. Considered together, Carr’s books and the Netflix series make a convincing argument that in the 21st century, we are all so connected that you can never escape yourself.

“There’s a need for positive drama,” Carr, a former California resident who now lives in Las Vegas, told Entertainment Weekly. “Not just goody-two-shoes, everything-is-beautiful kind of story, but a kind of story where people have real problems and real issues and they have to resolve them.”

Carr, who has set other novels in the Sierra foothills, the East Bay and Half Moon Bay, has said that Virgin River could be a community anywhere. And in this, her novels match the data.

Indeed, poverty rates are remarkably similar in California’s most populous and least populous places, especially when one looks at statistics that control for housing prices and cost of living. Pre-COVID, unemployment rates were nearly identical—under 5 percent in both rural and urban California. Education levels aren’t all that different either. Rural California, including Trinity County, actually has a higher rate of high school graduates than urban California, while urban California has a higher rate of college graduates.

Our constant talk of urban-rural divides has obscured the real story: the way once-remote places have become more urban. As more people are priced out of our mega-regions, they move to previously rural places, where growing populations support more urban-style development.

There is a convergence here, for good and bad. California jobs, both rural and urban, are heavily skewed to healthcare, retail, tourism, and government. Wherever I am in California, rural or urban, I hear civic leaders worry about the same stuff: decaying infrastructure, housing affordability, healthcare costs, and a lack of skilled workers.

Cities, once seen as dens of crime and disease, have become safer and healthier, while urbanizing remote places have fallen in rankings of public health and safety. And police misconduct, now dominating the news in cities, also plagues California’s small towns, many of which have seen George Floyd-inspired protests. Even Trinity County saw protests.

The mixing of urban and rural is actually quite Californian. Most of the people in counties that are considered remote, from Inyo to Humboldt, live in urban clusters. And 32 percent of California’s rural population lives in counties that are at least 91 percent urban. San Bernardino County—our largest county by area, extending from the L.A. suburbs to the Nevada and Arizona borders—is becoming more urban (as its suburbs grow denser) and more rural (as its far-flung areas lose people) at the same time.

While our winner-take-all politics exaggerates divisions, a closer look at Trinity County, which appears ruby red on political maps, shows that 49 percent of the county didn’t vote for Trump. Meanwhile, polling shows that dark blue Los Angeles County has a few million residents who support the president.

Virgin River, especially in the Netflix version (which, alas, was shot mostly in British Columbia), testifies to the lack of borders between rural and urban. Its storylines wrangle with the myths around both places. The “old country doctor” with whom L.A. nurse practitioner Mel Monroe tangles turns out to be a onetime medical hotshot from Seattle. Mel’s love interest, that outdoorsy barkeep, grew up in Sacramento and spent his military career in the Middle East.

“Small towns can be nice,” the hunk, Jack Sheridan, tells Mel while he makes coffee after she complains about the lack of Starbucks. “And they can have their own brand of drama. And danger.”

Virgin River is not so far away from the rest of California after all.

The post What the Fictional Town of Virgin River Gets Right About California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“The commons” is a concept, an ideal. The commons are property we all share, property that’s owned not by any one person or group, but that’s held—well, in common. It also has a distinct history in the U.S., harking back to early American towns having an actual commons, an undivided piece of land owned jointly by all the residents of a town. It was a place where all could graze their cattle, bury their dead, and meet for church and to make community decisions.

Today, the concept of the commons is under threat in a country that has become more focused on individual rights than on collective ones. We hear more about the “tragedy of the commons”—the economist’s phrase for what happens to jointly held resources like clean water or air when everyone acts in their own self-interest—than about the value of the commons.

To understand the long history of the commons in American life, I went looking for it. Little Compton, Rhode Island, where I live, has an actual, physical commons. The town green is officially “the Commons.”

Little Compton was originally part of the Plymouth Colony, which designed towns to include a space for the government and church in the center of things, embracing the idea of the commons both as civic space and as a way of governing. (This sets Little Compton apart from most Rhode Island towns, which lack town greens, and opposed established churches.)

When Little Compton was laid out in the late 17th century, each purchase from the Sakonnet people was divided among the 29 “First Proprietors,” men from Plymouth Colony who had been promised land on the frontier. An additional equal section was set aside for “Minister,” land to be rented or sold to support the church.

And then a plot of land in the center of town, about 20 acres, was set aside for the church and for government offices, a common burial ground, a pound for wandering animals, and space for the drilling of militia.

This plot was called the Commons from the start. In 1694 the town erected a building to be used as a combined town hall and church, tavern and poor house. It was a place for community in a community that still owned much in common and made decisions as a group. (Not an inclusive group, though: the town’s Native population, its enslaved and free African-Americans, and women were not present at the town meetings.) Among the early decisions at the town hall: the laying out of roads, apportioning the town’s allotment of salt, and the division of the town’s woods.

Ideas about community and what was properly owned in common changed dramatically over the following decades. In 1724 a new church, separate from the Town Hall, was built on the Commons, the beginning of the separation of church and state.

By the end of the 19th century, these official structures were joined by new types of semipublic buildings, fraternal organizations for narrower slices of community. The Grange was a gathering place for farmers, providing education and lobbying for their interests. The Odd Fellows Hall offered fellowship and opportunities for community service. The government expanded too: The poor house had moved, but now there was a school and a hearse house, for the shared, town-owned hearse. There were two churches, a Methodist church joining the Congregational one. There were also more spaces that were privately owned but publicly accessible, including a general store and shops. The federal government was represented by a post office, established in 1834. Its official address was “Commons, Rhode Island.” It was still a commons, but one that had been subdivided in new ways.

I visit the Commons fairly frequently, both public and private sides, to buy a dump permit from the town hall, attend an event at the Community Center (in the old Grange Hall), visit the library, or eat at Commons Lunch. When last I visited, I took a good look at just what was common—what was still public—about the Commons today. What does commons mean, in our era of privatization?

There’s still much about the Commons that is held in common. The property is still owned by the town, except for the plot where the church stands, which is now owned by the church. There are government institutions: the town hall, school, and post office. Much of the land is occupied by the town burying ground, which also includes the town’s war memorials. All of this reflects, in a modern way, that sense of shared purpose that goes back to the Plymouth Colony.

Where that starts to change is in the new additions to the public domain. The Commons has been extended to include a large area for public recreation, including a soccer field, tennis courts, and playgrounds. These are on town-owned land and are maintained by the town government. But, as with so many recent public amenities, these facilities are actually public-private partnerships, dependent on donated funds and volunteer labor for construction.

The town library, on the other side of the Commons, is another example of this public-private duality. It’s actually the Brownell Library, bequeathed to the “people of Little Compton” by Pardon Brownell, a “generous citizen, whose ancestral roots are deeply fastened in the community,” in 1921. (The existing town library was combined with it 40 years later.) The Brownell Trust maintains the building; taxpayers fund staffing, books, and supplies; and a separate nonprofit group supports programs.

This public-private framework means that decisions about community are made by segments of the community, those who care most, or have the time or funds to support their interests, and not by the town as a whole. Many of the organizations that support community life are nonprofits. They might receive a small amount of government support, but also do a great deal of private fundraising.

The Village Improvement Society, just off the Commons, was founded in 1914 by Georgiana Bowen Withington, a wealthy summer resident, to help the town “develop along the lines so carefully drawn by the wise first settlers.” It was not to be a charity, but “an effort to stimulate the people to get for themselves the good things of life,” established by “leading citizens” but open to all. The Community Center, established in 1993 to provide “educational, social, and cultural programming for the enrichment of the community,” fundraises to support after-school activities, a summer camp, and other programs. There’s a Senior Citizens Center, sharing the building with the Grange.

Does the Commons still serve as a commons? I think it does. It’s still the place for official government work: elections, town meetings, and committee meetings. It’s where citizens go to interact with town offices, or attend the annual town meeting. It’s the place for other kinds of community, too, both the kind supported by nonprofits and those that form at restaurants and coffee shops. It also serves as the location for grassroots politics: the Sakonnet Peace Alliance has held vigils in “peaceful witness against war and violence” at the Commons every Sunday since 2003. The Commons, as community space, still does important work.

There are also other common spaces, beyond the Commons, in my town, and I set out to visit them all to see if their history might help explain the changing meaning of commons.

Public access to the shore is a hot issue in any seaside town, and it’s been contentious in Little Compton since its founding. That first division of land included a very small lot for a “herring ware,” a commonly owned stone structure for catching fish when they ran in the spring. And the shores of the rivers and ocean that bound Little Compton would have been public, for fishing—that was in Rhode Island’s Royal Charter. Locating the shoreline, and determining what activities were allowed, has been fought in courts for centuries.

In 1796, the town arranged with a major landowner to secure a new common space. In exchange for a road to his farm at the harbor, William Rotch granted town residents access to the harbor, agreeing to let them collect sand and seaweed, build wharfs, and keep boats there. Through the farm and road have gone through many changes of ownership, and many legal battles, the public access remains. Today, the southernmost part of that property is called Lloyd’s Beach, and a sign grudgingly allows town residents to enjoy it. A guard is posted in the summer, to keep out-of-towners out. The citizens of 1796 would no doubt be pleased that public access remains, but never could have foreseen the new uses and meanings the Commons they established would take.

The Sakonnet River, which borders Little Compton on the west, tells another story through two public access points to its waters, Town Way and Taylor’s Lane. These were once points where ferries provided access to Newport, across the river. Roads that once led to wharves became roads to access the rocky shore for fishing and swimming. These are unmarked and hard to discover. They aren’t secret, exactly, though maybe folks are happy if people who don’t already know about them don’t find out. Small towns can be like that.

Another point of access to the shore introduces a new era of the Commons: public spaces donated to the town by wealthy residents. In 1949 Hester Simmons willed Town Landing, a lovely, if rocky, oceanfront property, to the town. (Rumor has it that she did so to spite a neighbor.) It was one of several gifts the town received at midcentury from wealthy residents. Elizabeth Mason Lloyd offered Wilbour Woods, a park. Sophie Wheeler gave the town a ball field in the village of Adamsville. These philanthropists assumed that the town was the proper owner of property held for the public. The town had to promise to care for the property—something that it has struggled to do in recent years. The publicly owned commons only works if the town has the will, and the finances, to support it.

Perhaps that is why local residents in recent years have turned to more private ways of creating public lands. The Sakonnet Preservation Association, a private, nonprofit land trust, was founded in 1972 to “promote the preservation of natural resources in the Town of Little Compton, including water resources, marshland, swamps, woodland and open spaces.” It receives property or a conservation easement by gift and protects it from development. A few properties are public, open to hikers and nature lovers; most are closed to the public, conserving properties of environmental interest, or viewsheds, sometimes to the benefit of those who donated them. The Nature Conservancy, a national organization, also holds lands and easements in town, including two of the most used “public” parks in town.

Land trusts are private solutions to a public concern, but they come with public costs: the tax deductions for donations, and the removal of land from the tax rolls. And, of course, there was no “commons” in the decision-making. Decisions about which land to preserve has been privatized—given to the donating landowners and the associations who accepted their gifts. These undeveloped properties appear to be commons, but they are free of the messy local democracy and taxes that actually bind commons and community together. They’re a privatized commons.

A park just down the street from my house with the ungainly name of the Simmons Mill Pond Management Area suggests that there’s still a role for government to play in creating public space. State owned, the area encompasses some 500 acres of woods that are managed by the Department of Environmental Management for hunting and fishing. A public-private partnership made the purchase possible in 1995; a major local foundation, the Champlin Foundation, provided some of the funding. On the other side of town, there’s another state property, with a boat ramp into the harbor—done in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy. Both of these projects also received federal funds from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program–supported by a special tax on motorboat fuel and fishing and hunting equipment. Public, but a narrow slice of public. The Commons is increasingly complicated, splintered.

My visits to these commons gave me a new appreciation for my town. Spending time in all of these various public spaces made the town feel like it was home in a way it hadn’t before. Learning the history of those places helped me understand something important about what it means to belong. I appreciated both the public and private groups and the individuals who made possible these public and natural spaces for me to enjoy. But the visits also made me worry about the changing meaning of commons, privatization, and the lack of transparency in decision-making, as well as the lack of government support for places so important to creating community. These beaches, these parks, and even that old burying ground on the Commons, once the sturdy embodiment of our collective ideals, now feel as fragile as the concept itself.

The post In Search of ‘the Commons’ in Modern America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But that was when the U.S. was still largely an agrarian society, and by the early 20th century urban opportunity was sucking the energy out of such places. After World War II agribusiness replaced family farms, big box stores killed local enterprises, and manufacturing jobs all but disappeared. Today, only about 9 percent of the population lives in places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. And the most notable features of many of those places are shuttered businesses and dilapidated houses.

So I was surprised and delighted to notice that, early in the 21st century, the hardscrabble Long Island village I passed through to get to my summer retreat had taken on a new look.

The tiny downtown of Greenport, New York is now graced by a grassy expanse leading down to Peconic Bay, a carousel attracting young families from “up-island” and New York City, and restaurants that attest to its status as a foodie destination. The village has undergone a transformation of the kind that most small American towns gave up on decades ago.

Its success is visible everywhere. Lovely old houses have been restored, yachts preen at the marina, and summer events include bowdlerized Shakespeare on the lawn and Monday evening dances en plein air. The annual Maritime Festival brings together old-time Greenporters—some are descendants of families who settled the area in the 1640s—and denizens of the new tourist economy. For the first time since 1950, the census of 2010 recorded an increase in population, to 2,190 full-time residents, with another 500 or so part-timers.

This revitalization has two principal sources. In the 1990s a vigorous and imaginative mayor found public and private support for a park that would anchor his vision of a revived downtown. And as his dream became reality, a new working class arrived to staff it—immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

They found work in and around Greenport—landscaping, housekeeping, construction—and housing. Often these immigrants enjoyed the company of family members or friends from home who had preceded them. By 2010 they constituted one-third of village residents. “They’ve saved this town,” says former mayor Dave Kapell, who sparked the renewal.

As I got to know (and interview) a number of the newcomers, I discovered that settling in Greenport offered them more than material benefits. On several levels they appreciated the peacefulness of their surroundings. For the family from El Salvador that ran a pupuseria the North Fork of Long Island was a political haven; a Guatemalan gardener was grateful to be living among fields and vineyards. Familiarity was part of the appeal. And it seemed safe. Upon arrival in the country, many people had spent time in Brooklyn or Queens—before choosing rural life because it seemed crime-free, even if, for some, the threat of deportation loomed.

Curious about small-town immigration beyond Greenport, I started to make a list of communities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants and large numbers of foreign-born residents. I quickly concluded that, at least where immigrants have settled, rumors of the death of the small town have been greatly exaggerated. All over the country, immigrants, whether legally present or undocumented, have brought new life to towns abandoned by agriculture and manufacturing sectors.

A number of those towns are in the Midwest, especially Iowa, which is 87 percent non-Hispanic white. In Denison, with 8,390 residents in 2013, it is no longer true, as one commentator noted in the early days of the new century, that you could “nap undisturbed” on a sidewalk in the business district. Renovation of that part of town now reflects the 14 percent population increase since 2000; nearly half of the residents are Hispanic, and half of those are foreign-born. West Liberty, with 3,733 residents, up 12 percent since 2000, has the distinction of being Iowa’s first majority Hispanic community, with about one-quarter foreign-born. According to its mayor, in 2011, “If you didn’t have the Hispanic population here in town, there would be a lot more storefronts that are empty.”

While the majority of immigrants in small towns come from Mexico, with a growing presence from Central American countries, other continents are represented, too. In Dalton, Georgia, almost 60 percent of the student body in the public schools is Hispanic (most American-born children of immigrants), but there are also students from dozens of countries who speak 22 languages, according to school district officials. In Huron, South Dakota, almost 7 percent of the population of 13,163 is Asian, from Thailand and Burma.

Immigrants from India, Japan, and China have contributed to the economic recovery of Columbus, Indiana, the hometown of the 2016 Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence. New tastes and cultural practices come from refugee communities, too. Ten miles from Burlington, Vermont, farmers from Rwanda and Bhutan are responding to the demand for goat meat among their fellow refugees from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

Adapting to the needs of immigrants in small towns presents some challenges. English as a Second Language teachers are expensive additions to the budgets of small school districts. Native-born citizens (including police officers) of small towns usually have little exposure to the languages and customs urban residents encounter in daily congress. Complaints about immigrants butchering animals in the backyards of Dalton or drying fish on the clotheslines of Huron are typical of neighborhood tensions. And residential crowding—families doubling up to save money and find companionship—is a general concern, as it is in cities.

But the process of adjustment to the new demographic reality in many small towns is proceeding much as it did in more traditional urban environments during the last immigrant wave a century ago—with the acquisition of English, the discovery of economic opportunity, and the rising of the next generation of Americans.

It is, of course, too much to think that an influx of immigrants can reverse the decline of the American small town or that small towns are the answer to the manifold challenges of immigrant integration. But some communities are no longer places to leave—just ask those who have recently arrived.

The post Want to Preserve American Small Towns? Embrace Immigrants. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.