Q&A: ‘Why Do People Stay?’

By Olivia Weeks

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Amanda McMillan Lequieu is a professor of environmental sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her recent book, Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt, is a study of two post-industrial communities – southeast Chicago and Iron County, Wisconsin – and the longtime residents who are at home in each of them.

Enjoy our conversation about the interconnectedness of rural and urban deindustrialization, below.

Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Let’s start with a description of the place where you grew up and a little on how that background informs the work you’ve chosen to do. 

Amanda McMillan Lequieu: Sure, so I grew up in a village of 700 people outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was a town that did not have a centralized sewage system, still does not to this day. It has one elementary school and one high school. It’s a village that grew up around a short-lived coal boom originally in the early 1900s. The coal seam was a bust pretty quickly, but then it was a bedroom community for steel workers going into Pittsburgh for some time. And it remained a bedroom community even after the steel industry collapsed, with folks like my father commuting into the city for white-collar jobs or other blue-collar jobs.

So I grew up in a pretty liminal space, this very rural village in a rural county outside of a large, mid-Atlantic city. (Pittsburgh is not midwestern. I have a strong opinion on that.) And in this location, I saw examples of environmental issues. There was still acid runoff from the coal mine, so in big rainstorms the local creek would run orange from rusting exposed rock. There were environmental issues with the lack of a sewage treatment plant. But then I also saw a lot of economic issues. In the 80s and 90s, there was still a grocery store and some local small businesses, but even those were struggling. And now those have completely shuttered.

I went to graduate school, worked abroad for a little bit. I now live in Philadelphia as a professor of sociology. My parents didn’t stay either – once all of us were out of the house, they moved to another rural community, maybe 45 minutes away, and reestablished roots on a larger piece of land. So I was curious why people stayed in this community. It’s beautiful, but it’s a tough place to make ends meet. And it has collectively really struggled over the years.

So fast forward: I go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school in sociology.

I initially did some research with farmers, thinking about their connection to place and about intergenerational farmland transition. It’s really hard to pass the farm on to the next generation. I kept circling back to these questions about residential stability and what ties people to place practically in a sociological sense. But then, also, how do these sentiments of home and connection to history show up in the way that people talk about their relationship to places that are hard to live in? That’s where the rural background really shows up.

My book talks about rural and urban, because I don’t think you can talk about a crisis like deindustrialization in just a rural or in just an urban sense. These were interconnected processes. Whenever steel and iron went bust, it impacted both rural and urban communities within a decade or two of each other. So I wanted to tell these two stories together, because I think there’s a lot of similarities, just like I experienced with my village outside of Pittsburgh.

DY: Can you describe how you chose the book’s case studies? I really appreciated that you selected two nodes on the same industrial pipeline, so can you talk a little about that strategy?

AML: This book is about two communities, one rural, historically iron-extracting county in Wisconsin, and one urban steel-manufacturing hub on the southeast side of Chicago. Two chapters of my book are deindustrialization stories, so boom and bust. But the rest of the book, another four chapters, focuses on what’s been since then. That’s because, contrary to our imaginations, I think, communities like these two are not ghost towns.

There are still people going to work, making ends meet, proposing new policies to change the on-the-ground realities for folks, and lobbying for new businesses to come in and open up. So there’s real active placemaking, homemaking, and economic activity happening on the ground. And I wanted to understand what that looked like.

So first, I started with a rural case. I was really fascinated with Iron County, Wisconsin, which is a low population density county that abuts Lake Superior. It’s one of the poorest and one of the oldest counties in Wisconsin and the population’s around 6,000 for a county of 730 square miles. I first got interested because in the early 2010s there was a proposal for a new iron mine there. This raised a lot of nationally important questions about what the purposes of these post-industrial communities should be.

The new iron mine didn’t end up panning out in Iron County, but I think it raised really important questions like, “What is our future? How have we made ends meet in the past 60 years since the last iron mine closed? And then what is the ideal way forward?” I think it also tapped into bigger questions: What are places that were designed for something that is defunct going to do moving forward?

Then, I was thinking about this and how this is also an urban issue. This is an issue of an entire massive industry structurally disappearing from the U.S. economy, essentially. The southeast side of Chicago was a manufacturing hub connected to these northern iron ranges. In these urban locations, I was really interested to see whether some of the same questions were being asked on the ground, so the southeast side of Chicago was my selection. It is also relatively low in population density, although there’s 10 times as many people in the one neighborhood of Chicago I was focusing on than in the whole of Iron County. It’s still the least densely populated ward in the city of Chicago. So there are these rural elements to the way the landscape is experienced by people on the ground. It’s part of Chicago, but it’s also not really connected to public transportation. There also aren’t really great job opportunities there.

I saw again and again all these interesting similarities that I think are important for us to figure out.

DY: You posed a lot of really interesting questions about the futures of these communities. What were some of the answers you heard? How did the answers differ between the two places?

AML: I conducted around 120 interviews – so 60 in each location – with primarily long-term residents. I define those as people who observed and lived through boom and bust, people who had been there in Iron County since the last mine closed in the 1960s and in the southeast side of Chicago since the first mill closed in 1980, people who experienced some component of this decline from very high middle class wages and a significant decline in lifestyle and economic capacity in these two communities.

DY: So by focusing on this group of people, you’re getting a generational picture too, right? Did that factor into your analysis? 

AML: Yeah, I focused on an older generation. I did interview a handful of folks who were younger but I really wanted to capture – not just the contemporary experience – but also this long arc, because I really believe that the strategies and contexts in which we make decisions accrue on top of each other, kind of like geological layers and rock formations.

And so long-term residents – the older generation, the folks that in the decades immediately following company closures – they’re the ones who ran for mayor, joined the town board, made policies, and created economic revitalization plans. They were the ones who had to make decisions about commuting really long distances in order to keep their home and send their kids to the local public school.

I think for us to understand today’s landscape of economic development in both rural and urban places, we’ve got to understand how these folks responded in the past and what barriers they faced. How did they push back against zoning policies, for instance, or how do they respond to and remember the removal of the industrial railroad? That came up again and again, particularly in the older generation. But they weren’t nostalgic for it in a classic, “Ah, the good old days, the railroad was great” kind of way.

They were really concerned because they saw that railroad removal would limit industrial reinvestment, because it’s very hard to transport lots of stuff unless you have a really good industrial transportation system. And with only two paved highways crisscrossing Iron County, they knew that when the railroad companies pulled up those rails, that it was closing off some important economic development opportunities.

DY: The railroad removal is such a powerful image because it doesn’t just mean that the railroad’s not useful at that moment, it means that there’s no vision of the future. It’s worth more to these companies as scraps than as a possible transport line.

AML: Isn’t it so powerful? I’m working on a different academic paper on this, because I feel like people studying issues of decline or economic change might overlook what this means when rural people bring up the decline of rail. It hit me again and again, people would still tear up in Iron County when they talked about the removal of the railroad. They would feel very viscerally that capital disinvested in them again and again and again. They were deemed collectively as “not worth it.”

DY: I think we’re still on topic with that initial question that I asked, about the different answers that people had about what their towns are for, going forward. You described your data collection process, so what was in the data?

AML: Something that really struck me across both rural and urban settings is that today there are two predominant visions for what these two communities should look like. Outdoor recreation is one of them and reindustrialization is the other. For folks who are living in rural America, it might not be that surprising. We know that, particularly in the wake of Covid-19, there’s been a rise in rural gentrification and natural amenity tourism in beautiful places, and Iron County, Wisconsin is a beautiful place.

Since the 60s outdoor tourism and winter activities have been really important to Iron County economically. In fact, the USDA categorizes it as a tourism dependent county. Then we also have this potential new iron mine or other forms of large-scale industry as another vision, not necessarily contradicting natural amenity tourism because, again, Iron County is pretty sparsely populated. A lot of residents said that even if an iron mine opened, it likely wouldn’t actually impact tourism because there’s a lot of land to be tourists on.

What surprised me was that, in the southeast side of Chicago, the exact same set of answers came up. On one hand, the southeast side of Chicago has thousands of vacant properties because of the closure of the steel mills that have been turned into parks. About a quarter of the city’s parkland is on the southeast side, and these are gorgeous parks. There’s a bike park for BMX bike racers. There’s parkland that is set aside for bird migration and bird watching. There are parks along the lakefront. So, you’ve got these beautiful views of the city of Chicago as you look over Lake Michigan. But unlike in Wisconsin, where you’ve got potential industry built into the hills far, far away from where the tourists might be – in Chicago, everything’s tighter. It’s about 25 square miles, instead of 730 square miles. These are not the steel mills that offered high wages of the mid-century. These are new industries like fertilizer manufacturing, metal recycling plants, waste depositories. So, right next to the bike park we have these really smelly, polluting areas that have been reallocated to industry. This is an active site of tension for people who are living in the Southeast side of Chicago.

DY: Thinking about it as an active site of tension in both of these places, what venues do you see people using to push forward their visions for the future and to have these arguments about how their places are changing?

AML: I think here’s where the differences between the rural and urban cases really stood out to me, because in Chicago, there are layers and layers of bureaucracy and politics. There potentially are more resources available because this neighborhood I studied is part of a large city.

But often I found in my research, really great proposals just ground to a halt due to the many layers of political agreement they required. A lot of my interviewees were kind of disheartened because they decided to stay in this gorgeous community, but they wanted to fight for environmental well-being because they know they’re living next to these stinky, smelly waste depositories. But they kept hitting walls in making sure that they were living in a place that was environmentally healthy for them.

Iron County is just a smaller community. The same people I interviewed, many of them are on the county board. Many of them are trying to speak up and represent different perspectives on reindustrialization or tourism development. There wasn’t as much of a bureaucratic line, I think, between everyday residents and those who are making the big decisions.

What I found in Iron County was there are more resource limitations. Several interviewees who have been in local government for decades voiced frustration that, because of their declining population, they were getting less funding from the state. So they had to spend a lot of time applying for federal grants in order to, for instance, expand broadband access.

They’ve been able to do that very successfully, but that slows the process of economic redevelopment in and of itself. Maybe one year they apply for the grant, it’s not funded and they have to do it all over again.

We have these different challenges facing residents on the ground in these two communities. Even though they really do have a vision for at least trying to get better jobs, less environmentally polluting jobs, better paid jobs, local jobs in their communities, they are hitting some walls. And a lot of those walls are beyond their control.

DY: What do you envision your relationship to these two places will be like going forward? Will you keep writing about them? What’s the plan?

AML: Yeah, that’s a great question. I just chatted with an interviewee in Wisconsin last week, and she gave me a really helpful update about what has happened just in the past two years in Iron County with an influx of immigrants buying up some housing, making housing access a little more challenging. Then I’ve also been in touch with some connections in the southeast side of Chicago who are still fighting for some environmental justice concerns that they have there. Going forward, I hope to stay connected with the on-the-ground concerns of these two communities.

I left this research project really impressed and inspired by the ways that long-term residents of all ages – even young people who left and then came back after college or vocational school – they are there to stay and they are there to fight for the wholeness and health of their communities. Even if they’re not all exactly aligned on what that should look like, they all have the same vision of making their communities more economically and environmentally sustainable moving forward.

I want to keep my fingers on the pulse of what’s going on. I do want to track rising concerns about environmental justice on the southeast side of Chicago and housing shortages in Iron County, which is an increasingly challenging thing across rural America as well.

So yeah, we’ll see moving forward. I hope to stay in touch with everyone there. But it was a really cool experience to spend so many years studying these places.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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Photo credit: A local resident points out a makeshift map for a park with remnants of iron mining on the Iron County, Wisconsin/ Ironwood, Michigan border. (Image by McMillan Lequieu)