"Frankly, it's Wichita Falls"

[royiv 9317]

3 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Rural America doesn't vote for the political party that prioritizes those things.

That was kind of my point.

[atomheartbevo 89667]

On 8/1/2024 at 12:05 PM, mdmost said:

I once had a nightmare that I was married to my sister-in-law instead of my wife and was stuck with her and her two kids in Wichita Falls. 

How was the sex?  Or was that the nightmare?

On 8/1/2024 at 12:44 PM, Chad Fuck said:

Lawton is a true shithole.  It's like Wichita Falls, but it's in Oklahoma. 

Terribad.

I spent a few years at Fort Sill.  Terribad doesn’t begin to describe it.

[TKthunder2 4991]

4 hours ago, Frank Drebin said:

Some damn good hunting around Munday/Weinert/Rule.  Some of the best waterfowl hunting I've ever done.  Good for dove and Sandhill Crane also.  And surprisingly good deer country.  

Killed my first buck in Quanah.

[CycleTex87 2970]

It was a good place to grow up in.  Then went to Austin for college and saw the wider world.  

[Gil Bang 25957]

On 8/1/2024 at 1:43 PM, Chad Fuck said:

This is my favorite country disco song.  Our band plays it every time. 

WTF are those hideous guitars?

[Longhornstampede 3182]

On 8/1/2024 at 11:01 AM, Zepol87 said:

Man after spending summers on the family watermelon farm in Munday and the lumber yard in Rhineland Wichita Falls felt like New York. Those places suck ass

 still never understood how in 1931 the family crossed from Mexico and said yea let’s just stop here

Yeah I know the song is about a different town but your post made me think of this lyric.

Flatter than a tabletop.

Makes you wonder why they stopped here

Wagon must have lost a wheel or they lacked ambition one

On the great migration west

[Longhornstampede 3182]

Shit, that's what I get for not reading the entire thread first.

[Deej 76791]

Small Texas towns may be dying shitholes, but at least they get recapture money from AISD for nice football stadiums.

[Frank Drebin 5639]

18 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

Rural America doesn't vote for the political party that prioritizes those things.

If only we could get the geniuses who do such a wonderful job running our big American cities to run our small towns the small towns would do really well.   It would be paradise.  

[Brisketexan 105139]

If only we could get the geniuses who do such a wonderful job running our big American cities to run our small towns the small towns would do really well.   It would be paradise.  

You mean the guys who run the places that are indisputably our economic engine vs the places that are dying on the vine with no opportunity? Huh. Interesting idea.
That said, I don’t think it has shit to do with “local administration.” Dingleberry, Texas isn’t succeeding or failing because of its mayor. The entire city coming and social model has changed. I mean, it’s also not lucrative to run a trading post along the stagecoach route. Shit changes.

[Chad Fuck 17681]

13 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

WTF are those hideous guitars?

Yeah, that's not the best vid of them.  Though they do play the Parker Fly as recently as a couple years ago.  My band was an opener for them in a little podunk east Texas town.  They put on a good show though.

[Horn Draoi 255]

I was born at Wichita General.  My father’s first degree was from Midwestern.  Our little family got the hell out.  Even my sentimental mother hated going “home” to Iowa Park to visit her parents.  It’s an amazingly dreadful place-debatably worse than collie station.

[Sandman 3403]

10 hours ago, Frank Drebin said:

If only we could get the geniuses who do such a wonderful job running our big American cities to run our small towns the small towns would do really well.   It would be paradise.  

As a state employee (not Texas), my biggest gripe is the lack of urgency to modernize anything. Public transport is non-existant, the post office sucks. Most of the day to day services NEED to be online only. Make well laid out, simple to navigate websites and speed up the processes. But they don't change anything until they either get sued for not following statutes, or a friend of a legislator gets pissed off and runs to his buddy to bitch. 

[Texzilla588 769]

This has been going on for years. There are fewer people in western Nebraska or eastern Colorado than in 1890. Ag changes are part of it but the real culprit has been the loss of manufacturing jobs in small towns. The mattress factory, the carburetor plant, the shoe factory have all gone to China.

I worked from 07-13 for a national TV distributor. Had 9000 dealers, every small town had a “court square TV /appliance/ furniture” dealer. Most had a rent to own guy, a credit furniture house, and an emporium on the highway that sold all kinds of shit like utility trailers and swamp coolers. that number was half by 2013.

Only the really good ones survived, but they’re dying out. Not the biz but the owners. The kids want nothing to do with the small town or the business, and now live in Albuquerque or Denver. They get stuck because it's hard to get loans for a new owner, do they sellboff their inventory and lease or sell the building.

smart towns are doing what they can to attract remote workers with moving allowances and housing grants. durango co set the bar and smart towns see it as a cheap date. but you have to have some proximity to a big city, good schools, and a good quality of life. WF is fucked

[squib 1120]

One of the issues it seems is that many of these bigger towns/smaller cities were built around a single industry and sometimes a single employer. When that business goes under, not only do you have massive unemployment but the tax structure collapses. The only people that stay are the ones that can’t get out. 

Plainview was once a bustling, growing city between Lubbock and Amarillo. Busy downtown, decent schools, thriving economy. And at the center was Cargill beef processor with 3,000 employees and $60 million in payroll. Good life for many people and all those in the area that provided services to those employees. 

Then the rain stopped. The local feedlots couldn’t afford to ship corn/feed into a system that was used to getting it brought from across the road. The cattle were liquidated. Very quickly there was no beef to process in Plainview. Cargill shut down, the feedlots shuttered, the teams that grew the corn went broke, the cafe that fed the meat packers and the cowboys went out of business and so on and so on….

Wife’s family had a farm west of there, and I was back and forth through Plainview as it collapsed—rapidly. When we were trying to sell the farm, we were there weekly sometimes and there was nothing left but the worst Chili’s I have ever seen and a Sonic. Whole areas of town are abandoned. Left behind rib-showing dogs walking the streets. 

Glad to say I may never see it again other than to visit the graves of the in-laws. 

These towns that were built around military bases and a single industry are either dead, dying or doomed and don’t know it yet. The rain will stop for them one day as well. 

[Brisketexan 105139]

One of the issues it seems is that many of these bigger towns/smaller cities were built around a single industry and sometimes a single employer. When that business goes under, not only do you have massive unemployment but the tax structure collapses. The only people that stay are the ones that can’t get out. 
Plainview was once a bustling, growing city between Lubbock and Amarillo. Busy downtown, decent schools, thriving economy. And at the center was Cargill beef processor with 3,000 employees and $60 million in payroll. Good life for many people and all those in the area that provided services to those employees. 
Then the rain stopped. The local feedlots couldn’t afford to ship corn/feed into a system that was used to getting it brought from across the road. The cattle were liquidated. Very quickly there was no beef to process in Plainview. Cargill shut down, the feedlots shuttered, the teams that grew the corn went broke, the cafe that fed the meat packers and the cowboys went out of business and so on and so on….
Wife’s family had a farm west of there, and I was back and forth through Plainview as it collapsed—rapidly. When we were trying to sell the farm, we were there weekly sometimes and there was nothing left but the worst Chili’s I have ever seen and a Sonic. Whole areas of town are abandoned. Left behind rib-showing dogs walking the streets. 
Glad to say I may never see it again other than to visit the graves of the in-laws. 
These towns that were built around military bases and a single industry are either dead, dying or doomed and don’t know it yet. The rain will stop for them one day as well. 

Yep. And there no denying how sad it is. Real people suffering. But it’s also timeless. The world is full of ghost towns, some thousands of years old, some from the American frontier, some from the last decade. Climate changes. Agriculture changes. Industry changes. Small towns don’t have the economic diversity to survive. If you’re built around the local guava crop, and guava either no longer grows there or isn’t getting a viable price, then the town dies. If the one factory that is your lifeblood moves to China, the town dies.
The transition is hard, sad, and brings local suffering. Such is the lot of humanity, always has been.

[BamaATL 16593]

The ultimate reality is that either you are in the economic sphere of a major metropolitan area or you aren't.  As it stands, anyone with any level of education and want for opportunity is going to gravitate towards that sphere for the sake of opportunity.  These places are going to die (economically) along with their aging populations.  Most of your ghost towns in the country were no bigger than a few thousand people at their peak, but now we may see some that at one point were 100k or more.  I don't think there is any sort of policy change that is going make any sort of difference with any of this.  If you look at the agriculture industry, and the automated farming stuff that already exists, plus what is coming, how many people are really going to be needed in these areas anymore? 

It's odd to think that for much of American history the dream was to have your own land (typically a farm) and the freedom associated with that.  In modern times, it's become to have your own cookie cutter half acre home just outside a major city.  Things change.  

[cactusflinthead 27598]

I didn't find that article by accident. It's ingrained into my brain that WF is the hard top of Texas and requires a certain amount of stubborn masochistic determination to exist. In all of the handwringing I wanted to know if there's been a significant loss of population. 

(Edit:My maternal grandfather lived there and I spent many summers and winters there.)

Well, yes and no. Maybe I should include surrounding communities too.

Edited August 4 by cactusflinthead

[safe sex 11727]

Everything y'all have said about WF crumbing to dust is true...and the Parkway Grill is pretty shit now. Like what is even the point?

 

[TKthunder2 4991]

12 hours ago, BamaATL said:

The ultimate reality is that either you are in the economic sphere of a major metropolitan area or you aren't.  As it stands, anyone with any level of education and want for opportunity is going to gravitate towards that sphere for the sake of opportunity.  These places are going to die (economically) along with their aging populations.  Most of your ghost towns in the country were no bigger than a few thousand people at their peak, but now we may see some that at one point were 100k or more.  I don't think there is any sort of policy change that is going make any sort of difference with any of this.  If you look at the agriculture industry, and the automated farming stuff that already exists, plus what is coming, how many people are really going to be needed in these areas anymore? 

It's odd to think that for much of American history the dream was to have your own land (typically a farm) and the freedom associated with that.  In modern times, it's become to have your own cookie cutter half acre home just outside a major city.  Things change.  

Those spheres can grow and shift over time. Look at cities like Waco and Laredo, eventually they will be their own economic spheres rather than simply sphere adjacent. The cities and suburbs will continue to grow, but if you want to help small towns Texas really should be pushing for more Federal interstate dollars.

While we have the most miles of interstate in the US, the majority of those are taken up by just a handful of routes. As far as number of interstate highways Texas only has 16 while California has 26 connecting early every major city to each other. Interstate 14 is going to be very beneficial for many of those communities West of I35, and I69 will help connect South Texas>Corpus>Houston>Deep East Texas>Texarkana but there are clearly other areas of opportunities in this state that could benefit from this type of expanded infrastructure.

Austin>Houston, DFW>WF>Amarillo(w/ a Spur to Lubbock), Deep East Texas>Central Texas (mirror of IH14).

Just look at a map and see all the small town that this could benefit. Clearly this is a double edge sword as they could just turn into glorified suburbs down the road, but if we are worried about these towns truly dying, this is a great way to increase population.