Picture of decline ripe for a populist
HIGH RATES OF POVERTY, UNEMPLOYMENT EASILY PROMPT RESENTMENT
President Barack Obama insists there is no reason on Tuesday for Americans to set everything on fire. Eight years ago they “were in the early days of the worst economic crisis in 80 years,” he told a rally in North Carolina last week. “But we turned the page. … Last year, incomes rose faster than any time since at least 1968; poverty fell at the fastest rate since at least 1968; businesses turned job losses into 15 million new jobs.”
It’s a reasonable pitch, especially when the revolution on offer, in the person of Donald Trump, is so ill-defined and orange. But by no means has everywhere turned the page.
Brunswick, on the South Georgia coast, took it on the chin from the housing crash: between 2007 and 2011 it lost 12.7 per cent of its jobs. Only places like Flint, Mich., can play in that league. Unlike Brunswick, Flint has rebounded.
“The thinking was that this stretch (of ) the South Georgia coast is like the last stretch of Atlantic oceanfront yet be developed,” says Don Mathews, an economics professor at the College of Coastal Georgia and a Brunswick resident for nearly 25 years.
“The thinking was Brunswick is going to boom. This area is just going to go (crazy). … People were just optimistic that businesses would move in.”
It’s understandable: the town is pretty, the nearby beaches and golf courses lovely. But at the corner of Newcastle and O streets, just north of downtown, a five-storey concrete shell of a condo building stands as testament to the miscalculation.
“There was overbuilding, both commercial and residential, and then when things tanked, they really tanked,” says Mathews. “Construction and finance and real estate, and then it started spreading to anything related: landscaping, furniture places, appliance places.”
It’s far from a unique story, just a longer one. Georgia’s per-capita real gross domestic product fell for a single year. In Brunswick, it declined every year until 2014 — a total of 11 per cent from 2009, the worst performer in the state and one of the worst in the U.S.
It’s not a mystery, according to Mathews’ research: without a housing boom, Brunswick’s economy is concentrated in low-wage tourism and leisure industries. Its population is relatively under-educated and the entrepreneurial spirit is not especially strong.
The result is nevertheless stark. The palm tree-lined main street, with its landscaped median and angle parking, is like a movie set waiting for a production: attractive, wellkept, and mostly bereft of real-life commercial activity.
Early Saturday evening, indie-folk duo Billy and Bella were tuning up at Tipsy McSway’s, a cheerful, divey little bar and grill that would be a perfect final stop on a Brunswick pub-crawl if only there were anywhere else to crawl.
“I’ve lived in the Southeast for, like, 25 years,” says Shawn Lightfoot, one half of the band, which is based in Jacksonville, Fla.
There are lots of places like Brunswick around, he says: “small Southern towns that are stuck in time, in a way, but also hotbeds for growth — for people who want to make it cool.”
It’s easy to imagine, but Mathews isn’t so optimistic.
“We’ve been waiting and waiting,” he says. “It’s not like Detroit, but people seem to be somewhat resigned.”
The housing market is certainly no disincentive: $294,500 buys a gorgeous 1908 fully renovated Victorian — 2,700 square feet, three bedrooms, 2½ baths, and a 900-year-old live oak just outside your front door, complete with a National Arborist Association plaque. There are many decent options in the $50,000-$70,000 range.
But in the northern part of the town proper, you see the sort of grinding poverty that is sadly associated with the American South: tumbledown homes, some abandoned, some seemingly uninhabitable.
It’s a visibly diverse community, and there is poverty to go around: census data from 2014 suggest 23 per cent of whites, 33 per cent of blacks and 51 per cent of Latinos live below the poverty line, making for a total of 34 per cent — almost twice the state average. And they live cheek-by-jowl with some of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever set eyes upon: an ornate Romanesque city hallcum-courthouse from 1889 here, a jaw-dropping plantation-cum-B&B house there.
All in all, it is a picture of decline in which one can easily imagine a populist message resonating. This is staunch Republican country, needless to say: Glynn County went 63 per cent for Mitt Romney. Donald Trump’s trade rhetoric might not be a natural fit: the port of Brunswick is a big part of the economy, and is known for exporting and importing automobiles. But the port doesn’t employ all that many people, says Mathews.
Indeed, Georgia — a right-to-work state — presents a frustrating situation for struggling workers in general. Last week, for the fourth straight year, Site Selection magazine named it the best in the U.S. in which to do business. Yet both its unemployment and poverty rate remain well above the national average. That does not conspicuously speak well of traditional GOP dogma.
If anything, it’s remarkable that free trade and other economic orthodoxies have marched as far as they have in North America without provoking a bigger backlash. They have 100 easily identifiable victims for every easily identifiable beneficiary.
And while “Make America Great Again” is a ridiculous slogan in the hands of Donald Trump, in a place like Brunswick it is impossible to roll your eyes at the sentiment.