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Like other parts of the Northern Forest, many Adirondack communities struggle to maintain strong schools, a robust workforce, and vital civic institutions. The challenges these communities face are economic and demographic, but the solution is simple: to attract and retain more young people to live in these communities.
In February 2021, the Center released Attracting New Residents to the Adirondacks: A Strategy for the Adirondack Park and its Communities. Download the full strategy.
Download the executive summary.
The strategy identifies opportunities for the Adirondack region to address these challenges and attract new residents by building on regional and community strengths and capitalizing on existing assets. With millions of annual visitors and people who deeply love this region, the Adirondacks is perfectly positioned to attract new residents who are looking for a home that aligns with their values, presents opportunity, and provides incredible quality of life.
The strategy is a guide for community leaders, nonprofits, and public entities interested in creating the conditions that may help attract a new generation of residents to the Adirondacks and bring back young people who have left. Hundreds of voices contributed to this document through individual interviews, online surveys, focus groups, and the annual Common Ground Alliance forum.
The Center is beginning to implement the strategy. The first steps are to establish partnerships with communities and to identify the levers that can have the most impact on this work.
We will need broad community engagement to succeed in this work. If you would like to be part of implementing this strategy – or hearing updates along the way – please email Adirondack Program Manager Leslie Karasin.
Image from the report: A map showing school district enrollment changes from 2008-2018 in the Adirondacks. Information from the National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/elsi/
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General inquiries about the Adirondack Almanack should be directed to editor
New to start managed logging , to create more diverse food lots, create jobs and economic income and to help control future forest fires. Need to end programs that refuse to allow locals job posting by town/county/stare based on ethnic requirements, if no ethnic applies then job should be given to a person who lives and knows the area. end anti-white discrimination. Stop spending state grants and funds to try and recruit people outside the Adirondack park area to fill job vacancy with some ethnic quota, stop increasing population of towns and denying locals jobs.
So, is this basically a logging/forest products lobbying group? I could never really find anything on their website that wasn’t overly vague.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I will say that I share Nathan’s sentiment, not really about the logging or salvage logging part, but in his seeing of the impetus to attract more people as misguided, as it would most likely end up being a detriment to the environmental draw of the Park and to the livelihoods and lifestyles of the already existing residents of the very communities that they are trying to protect. The APA limits population and industrial development, along with, obviously, all of the mountains–and logging, mining, tourism and skilled trades can only provide enough jobs to support so many people. And the lack of racial diversity in the forest preserve is precisely because it is a forest preserve, and capitalism dictates that living and working in such places will be more expensive than living in the periphery of an urban area. Furthermore, the more desirable living in the Park becomes, the more expensive it will get, further excluding traditionally impoverished people. Either capitalism would need to be eliminated or Income inequality in the nation at large would need to be solved to fully address that problem, but until then, I think that increasing public transportation access from urban areas to popular tourist destinations will at least offset the disparity created by the disproportionate number of white people who visit in their Subarus, RVs and pickup trucks.
Maybe the argument could be made that schools and other government services would benefit from population increase, but I think that there is certainly no lacking for a tax base in those districts that have all of that taxed land owned by the state and by second-home owners. And if we are going to use the mentality of “if you build it, they will come”, then there should be no problem filling government jobs where there are all of those tax funds to be spent. Even the most remote outposts of the Canadian Arctic have school teachers, because there is government money to pay for them.
To me, the actual report just looked like analyses of a small survey and old data, but it was very well put together and had some nice GIS graphics, obviously from the pros. I guess with any report of this type, the pitfall is that they are not even using the arguably flawed techniques of the “scientific method” to test a null-hypothesis, but rather are just trying to find data that will back up their preconceived point of view or agenda.
I am hoping that the 2020 census data will shed some light on the massive increase of activity that we are seeing up here (not just tourists) and maybe bring conformity there. We should be getting the individual Census Block data within the next few months. Maybe I will use my GIS processing experience to run some scripts on the new data, once we have it, to get a clearer idea of how much the population inside of Park boundaries actually went up…Then again, the 2020 Reference Date was April 1, 2020, so maybe we will need to wait until 2022 for the data to catch up.
Yes, also looking forward to seeing the Census data!
Hi Melissa, I think that they might be releasing block-level population data on March 31, and if that is the case, I will probably end up writing a script that determines which 2010 and 2020 census block boundaries lie completely within the Park boundary and cross-checks those results against population tabulations to get a Park-wide population change number. It will probably be a Python script that will be fairly simple for anyone to run on their own system, so anyone who wants to can run it on the data and verify the results themselves. If I remember correctly, NY census block boundaries align very closely with the APA boundary, but it is possible that there are exceptions. Anyway, I will be sure to email you the results using the link at the bottom of this site if I do! APA may release numbers as well, but I will probably beat them to it knowing them. I know that local demographic/misc. data is going to take a LONG time for the state/feds to release, probably the end of this year…Hopefully we will get the local population data on March 31.
That would be awesome, JB! Please do keep me posted at editor@adirondackalmanack.com 🙂
So the comments here are confusing and maybe someone can explain the following: this org is a logging association of some sort? Seems like maybe so in the past, but also looks like from their website that they’re aware of the fact that manufacturing is literally (mostly) dead in this country, no matter what anyone says. I just took a look, and yeah there are some programs to encourage manufacturing but also a lot of service-economy related stuff. And the report here isn’t appealing for more loggers to move to the area.
The decline of wood resource extraction seems universal in the US. Admittedly I don’t know that much about it, but this phenomenon keeps coming up. For example, the terrible law change that will allow logging in the Tongass apparently benefits one corporation (who bribed Murkowski) that employs extremely few Alaskans, who wants to chop down the trees to ship them straight to China, who will process them for cheaper because that’s *actually how capitalism works. I think Maine still makes toilet paper, but beyond that, I am not aware of a growing logging industry in the USA. Manufacturing is in Asia. We ship stuff there for them to sell back to us.
I’m gonna sail right past comments about “ethnics” (who the hell are ethnics? If you’re gonna stereotype, have the cajones to do so to our faces), or the notion that we have to “end capitalism” before any more tourists are allowed into the ADK.
We’ll never be able to *actually fight* the market based forces that put Americans to a disadvantage if you all just keep blaming “the ethnics” or the “Subaru drivers.” The point is that even IF the much-coveted-in-some-quarters “KEEP OUT” sign was built over the Northway, the NoCo still has an issue that its older population cannot sustain basic community services. In our increasingly diverse country and especially in the Northeast, the “Subaru drivers” and “ethnics” are the population available to change this. Of course people will market to them.
I shouldn’t have took the bait here, but I guess we’re all flawed. Sigh.
*taken the bait, pardon. lol comments don’t go through editing
Vanessa, I totally agree with your point about how the logging industry has become a political symbol, while in reality, even the largest logging operations have not created a substantial number of jobs in the Northeast in many decades, due to mechanization and globalization. Notwithstanding, there are still small-scale logging operations in the Park, mainly worked by people who have lived there for generations, but nothing that could support the kind of numbers of “jobs” that everyone is talking about.
I understand your frustration with the stereotyping of “ethnic” (non-white) people as impoverished, but I do think that historically that is the reason for the racial disparities in the population and visitation of the Park (or have I just drunk the Political Kool-Aid too?); I would not have felt the need to mention that (the “Subarus”) at all if it wasn’t a major talking point of the report and many other aspects of governance related to the Park that we have seen in the past several years.
Maybe I don’t understand correctly, but I thought that the whole argument about increasing access to the Park is mainly related to the perception that it is a place that only rich older white people can afford to be in, and the logic was that government incentives can fight the free-market forces that have led to this disparity–a logic espoused by either local government groups who will always want to increase their tax base, or by mainly outsiders who see this as an issue of equitably–under the guise of compassion for the supposedly “dying communities”, which they do not live in.
I understand the talking point that those communities need “young people” (again, mainly trumpeted by people who do not live in those communities), and that point is illustrated convincingly in the graphic above that shows declining school enrollment due to an ageing population (keep in mind, 10% in some of those school districts is only 5 people!). But why all the focus on creating such economies within the Park when, if you normalized the decline of “young people” in the Park vs. the decline in other rural regions nationwide, the Park’s numbers would possibly even be positive in relation to others? And, remember, it IS a Park! The reason that young people leave is usually for the same reason that they have left rural areas in general for decades: they leave for college, because our society now expects them to have such degrees (a whole other problem), and then FOMO dictates that they will want to stay in urban areas where other young people concentrate, which tend to be centers of industry. Keep in mind, the grass is always greener. For this reason, I think that many of the people pushing for this type of growth are doing so along ideological lines, either politically or because they want to move in themselves and see it as a utopian Garden of Eden, where we can have the best effects of exploitation without the harmful ones that have largely been absent from the Park in modern times (up until now). I am not sure of the Northern Forest Center’s motivations, as you said before…Maybe they are a contractor who is paid to develop reports for government groups?
Many people who live in urban areas do not realize just how quickly a rural place can become urbanized. I have lived long enough to see places go from farmland or desert to massive centers of population and commerce in less than a decade. I don’t fault such proponents of urban naivety, though, since, unlike rural areas, the places that such people come from can easily absorb tens of thousands of people without any noticeable change! Why aren’t we asking: “What is the human carrying capacity that the Park can accommodate without effects that are widely perceived as detrimental?”
It’s not that residents who oppose development want to erect a “KEEP OUT” sign, or that we want to only want “people of color” to keep out (wouldn’t that be a convenient way to dismiss everyone who doesn’t support population growth!). It’s that we understand what real life is actually like in rural areas, “jobs” are not an abstract statistic that we can just “increase” and “all will be great”. I think that maybe here we are seeing a little bit of that mentality that Dostoevsky observed in revolutionaries living in the cities of feudal Russia, who fought for “peasant rights” without ever asking the peasants themselves what they thought!
I would love to see a survey done that, instead of asking people who already ideologically want more people to live in the Park, asks Park residents or a randomized sample of the State population or people below the povertly-line if they see increasing the number of people in the Park to be a good thing…It would be nice to have a “study” done where, at least conceivably, we do not already know the outcome!
I will stereotype the three sides of this argument as: 1) humanists: idealists who fight for social justice, as they perceive their fight as “ethically right,” even if they may never personally see benefits OR HARMS from the effects of actualization of that fight; 2) family-men and business-men: those who fight for the well-being of themselves and the people within their direct personal spheres of influence, i.e. direct effects of actualization that they can personally experience as perceived material benefits; 3) environmentalists: activists who fight for the benefit of the non-human world that is at the behest of inevitable human exploitation, as they perceive their cause as “metaphysically” or “spiritually” right, even if the actualization of that fight will not directly benefit them themselves materially. Maybe these things are not completely mutually exclusive, but inevitably, one of these priorities will come first.
I apologize if I sounded snarky or ignorant. That is not my intention. I’m just continually confounded by this type of pro-growth rhetoric that is taken for granted these days! I think that it is intensifying as people retreat to their ideological camps, which could be bad for wilderness! If communities actually do disappear, which happens everywhere, then there will not be too many people around anymore to be disadvantaged. And to have a wilderness preserve, we need to make sacrifices, whether it be ideologically or materially.
A few thoughts in reply… I know urbanization well. My husbands family comes from a city that is still seeing urbanization on a scale that we can’t comprehend in modern America – a city that when he was born had a few 100,000 people and a mere 30ish years now hosts something like 9 million, and growing. He used to go to his grandpas house located in acres and acres of old growth rain forest, and now his grandpa lives on the bottom floor of a 10 story building surrounded by 10 story buildings (in the exact same spot, to be clear). My in-laws watch the sprawl eat up forest year over year in real time. All of this is in the context of the independence and “free market” economic growth of India. My point being – it was all rural area once. Here and there. It was all wilderness – in a past we no longer have access to.
But the Park is unique, in that it has a really strong legal framework to protect it from that exact type of development. It is already a product of “big government” and yes, I think we agree that that legal structure disrupts whatever market-based forces would otherwise drive urbanization. I wish people compared the situation more closely to that of Vermont, which seems like an extremely similar case but which seems to have made different choices, and which doesn’t have a big line drawn around a land mass bigger than dozens of US states. There are on-paper economic advantages to Vermont. A buddy at my company got the 10k incentive to move to Burlington instead of moving back home to upstate NY. He’s a software engineer, 100% remote. He seems like he’s having a great time, but I would not move to Burlington given a good situation, whereas we very much would move to the ADK if economic survival looked likely.
The marketing won’t convince everyone, but you’ve got to market at all to get anyone. I would also note that far from being a region that has only wealthy people, the income inequality in the ADK seems especially severe. Improving the local economy doesn’t matter to Lake Placid old money, but it sure as hec helps other people.
Finally, worth noting that you didn’t use the word “ethnics” and so my apologies if you’re uncomfortable with me calling that out. But it wasn’t market forces that have kept non-white people out of the region – it’s mostly just old fashioned racism. Racism is less of a “market phenomenon” in this day and age then some people would lead you to think, but is rather the result of specific government choices, choices made by govts big and small.
Boreas and Vanessa, I appreciate the correspondence.
I think that the crux of the problem that threatens wilderness here more so than in other developed countries–I too could tell you stories about Himalaya and the Far East that are absolutely crazy; luckily we aren’t experiencing that kind of population growth in this country!–is the way government works in the United States (and especially NY): if the government wants to create wilderness preserves it has to contend with republican (lower case ‘r’, NOT Republican) government structures with competing interests, operating more like private corporate entities than democratically elected government, not to mention corporate and private land owners. Contrast that with Russia or Scandinavia or Eastern Europe and their superb conservation outcomes, which they accomplish without even breaking a sweat! The APA offers us some protection, but in my opinion not nearly enough, as that already being eroded by the growth impetus that I so verbosely wrote about before. And then we could really end up looking more like your example of Vermont, which I would strongly argue would be a bad scenario.
I agree in that the racism “phenomenon” in the Adirondacks is a complicated issue, but stand by my argument. True, there is a lot of poverty in the Park, but look at the county parcel maps and you will see that most of the landowners (and even some geographic features) in any given area all have the same last names! That is because, although many of those (white) landowners/residents may live well below the poverty line, they are nonetheless owners of land and houses that have been in their families for generations. The same cannot be said of minorities, who by and large did not take part in the appropriations of land in this area over a century ago, due to “marketplace phenomena”. And such minorities today could certainly not afford to buy land and housing in the region at modern appreciated values! In fact, many rural Park residents intentionally try to keep the value of the county-taxable assets on their land as low as possible, while also trying to keep their taxable income down as well, and combined with strict zoning regulations and the abundance of public lands, this effectively creates a system that almost resembles Georgism!! On the other hand, if your proposed incentives took place, not only would those existing residents be potentially displaced by gentrification, but also minorities (for whom presumably the growth is supposed to provide accessibility to the region) would be even further excluded from relocating as well! Another important distinction to make is that most of those aforementioned “impoverished residents” did not “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” and relocate as part of the fulfilment of a mythical, cliché “American Dream”–again, only solidly middle class people can do that right now, even at the current rate of gentrification.
So, again, who does this proposed growth benefit? The only explanations I can come up with are the ones I gave in previous comments–and that the growth movement is a front for the justification of an ideological movement: a “humanist” movement that sees their own cultural values as inherently ethical and therefore, necessarily mandating a Crusade, a “young-ification”, a progressive cultural change. The beauty of that theory is that it explains the sudden urgency to accelerate such population growth. And while prejudice may very well be a worthwhile target (depending on who you ask), that should NOT justify throwing a century of conservation out the window, or even making environmental concessions that some may perceive as small in the bigger picture of the machinery of political and social movements–a picture that many people unfortunately are all too content looking at from afar without going in for a closer look at what the actuality on the ground looks like–the perspective of, say, someone who has lived since there long before the dawning of the age of our current political climate.
The problem is that this perspective that I am shouting from the rooftops to seemingly little avail used to be considered moderate! Now, in our current context–and context is everything–this argument, which I think is needed now more than ever in our mobile age of economic and environmental crisis, is considered anti-social, or even extremist! So, I will say: Try to forgive my steadfastness and examine the context more closely…Lest I will be passed off as maniacal. I am not saying that prejudice is non-existent; I am saying that its existence does not justify burying our heads in the sand when it comes to the real-world environmental havoc that accompanies our actions and ideals. And stating that simple logical argument should not automatically make me ignorant (not talking about you Vanessa, talking about general perceptions and cultural norms). This is the Catch-22 of the 2020s–any social movement that aligns itself against prejudice or abuse is unfalsifiable cannot be argued with!
Footnote: There should be a ‘*’ next to the word ‘minorities’ anywhere in that previous comment. In the context of the above use, the word ‘minorities’ should be read with regard to the demographic fact that most such populations are statistically less wealthy than the majority (whites), either due to the legacy of slavery or the legacy of colonialism in other countries predominantly populated by non-Caucasian peoples. And in the context of the Adirondacks, as previously stated, generational wealth is an important determining factor of demographics. That it not to say that all non-white citizens live in poverty, but rather to bring this discourse into alignment with modern social justice movements that concern themselves with such generational legacies.
Hi JB – it’s hard to be sincere in text format, but I do appreciate the comments & discussion here. I think we’re closer in agreement than you think regarding the importance of safeguarding the natural world from overdevelopment, especially the Park. I think we disagree regarding how humans should do that to live in harmony with their natural surroundings. It does seem like sometimes the nuance that can be had in a debate on this topic gets reduced to a discussion of quotas, essentially. We end up debating pure numbers of how many people should we exclude or otherwise limit from accessing the natural world. Even the high peaks overuse debate suffers from this. How many people is ok becomes the only question, rather than the much much more important discussion of how we get people to be good stewards. In my opinion, telling folks to just stay away isn’t a good strategy.
I don’t think that’s quite what you’re arguing – but imo it is kind of a slope.
I appreciate the foot note regarding your definition of minorities, lol, because otherwise you may have heard from me re that. :p while I take your point that there are some market-based forces that keep groups of people from living some places, I maintain that state-sanctioned & social racism has had a *much larger impact. And that racism takes a lot of different forms. Examples: redlining, crappy immigration policy spanning decades, up until the 70s all of the Jim Crow laws, all of the socially sanctioned racism that effected the country (Lake Placid is a great example) up through that time (and after), voter suppression now (which manifested just this year in the big lie about the 2020 election, where politicians on one side of the aisle shamelessly tried to invalidate minority votes in places like PA and Arizona, looking at Elise Stefanik among others), and on and on. The market can rarely compete with people’s social prejudices.
Now, there are definitely market incentives to be racist, and also, I think you and I also agree more than is apparent about the dangers of governing a society based only on capitalism. But again, the ADKs are already a special case. There’s already a lot of “big government” here, which is a fact the right and left agree on – lol, we just disagree on whether “big government” is good or not.
Vanessa, I had thought about saying exactly what you have just said as well, that we probably agree on more than it appears. And I am glad that you picked up on the rationale behind my footnote!
If I understand correctly, your argument when it comes to prejudice is that it affects representation in “big government”, which determines policy. I think that although that sort of systematic legal effort to exclude minorities from shaping policy has and does exist, you are probably overstating its relevance in the policies that have governed the Adirondack Park, at least up until now. If government policies were determined purely by consensus–we had a direct democracy that decided everything via referenda instead of a representative democracy–our society would very well be different, but I would argue that environmental conservation efforts would not have been nearly as successful. A supporting example for that argument can be seen in the stark contrast between the environmentally destructive policies of populist majorities (left and right, in America and beyond) and the amazing strides in environmental conservation that were achieved decades ago by moderate Republican and Democratic federal and state administrations–the kind of policies that may have been opposed by privatized localities and left-wing social justice movements, but always had a strong hope and footing in what used to be considered moderate compromising factions. That situation does not exist any more.
Of course, both you and I are speaking mainly in terms of generalities, as we rightfully should when discussing social movements and policies, especially related to stereotypes about stereotypes. In fact, without such generalities there would be no language to speak! So let’s not let that discourage us.
Therefore I will continue: The insanity of individuals (i.e., in board rooms of government agencies) does exist, but it is “rare” in relation to the insanity of “groups, parties, nations and epochs, [where] it is the rule.” Or I should say, the values of environmental conservation will inevitably be eroded in modern tribalist localities or a populist utopia–many of the settlers who first appropriated the lands of now right-wing rural America were once young utopianists too, and the recent proselytizing and crusading for an “equitable park” (in relation to the the material benefit and ethics of proponents of such beliefs) draws a frightful parallel with those Christian utopian movements who were first drawn to American “wilderness”, where they hoped to convert the landscape and noble savage to their own superior “ethics” and mores.
Bear with me… Here is the a better elucidation of the previously touched-on problem that I have with the arguments espoused by aforementioned populists: To justify my argument, I could have easily said, “People who move to the Park are super-privileged and hence racists OR super-violent and hence criminals.” And you could counter with any argument of your choosing, but I would then nullify any argument with, “But … because … prejudice OR criminals”. Now, you generally would have two options here: one, “join us”; or two, radicalize your ideology and dig yourself deeper into your own position. That ultima ratio regum dictates its own dominion over the discourse. The third option does not even occur to most players. In a previous conversation that you and I had back in depths of the internet, you had very astutely mentioned that we need “empathy” to solve that problem. And my argument was that the dialectic of “democratic materialism” dictates that “empathy” actually paradoxically created that problem–that the ever-increasing need for humanistic universality and acceptance and the real-world consequences of said ideology (i.e., increasing urbanization, echoing chambers of self-validation, inversion of Lacanian “university discourse”, erosion of universal truths and foundations, including erosion of ecological integrity) have collectively caused us to forget how to have a productive argument that can have any hope of a good outcome. How can there even be a “good” outcome in a modern civilization that asserts that there is no such thing as objective “good”? A productive argument cannot be rooted in ideology and ethics, but rather it must be a substantiated analysis of all of the minutiae of real-world consequences of its own aspirations, even those which are hard to logically foresee or discuss.
Now forgive me, as I am going to attempt to illustrate a relevant point using subversive absurdity, which I believe should not be restricted to the tool-chest of psychotherapists and Russian novelists, as it is a useful way to broaden our horizons and see through our own belief systems. On the two ideals of “jobs” and “social justice/prejudice”…If the coveted Messiah had returned to America in 2007, he would have been a stock-broker or businessman, thus the ideal of “jobs” that looms large in any political discussion to this day. If the Messiah had returned to America in 2020, his blue hair (or his assault-rifle shoulder-strap) would have streamed through clouds of tear-gas hovering above mobbed streets as he screamed at riot police, thus the ideal of “social justice” in modern discourse. Maybe in 2030, he will get a face-tattoo. Maybe, by 2050, he will be an extraterrestrial. Maybe he already is to some people. The point is, who knows? Our culture now changes at the speed of light, in addition to and also with respect to the cultures of multiply-colonized and enslaved peoples (footnote :)), but the “cultural values” of non-anthropic biotic communities (or abiotic systems) have remained consistent for periods of time that we cannot fathom. True, the non-anthropic world can adjust its behaviors to an extent in relation to human influences, but only in domestication could such “values” even conceivably have any hope of changing. That is the foundational purpose that such (eco)systems could be said to possess in relationship to us–they provide stability that not only maintains us materially but also provides an anchor that can salvage us from the abyss of “cultural relativism” (not in the sense of Boasian “cultural relativism”, but in the sense of “cultural” STOP “relativism”).
Anyway, you have the right idea (I think?) that I am not arguing that no human beings should be allowed in the park. But the difficulty in inhabiting the Park, be it through economics or bureaucratic policy or geography, is why it exists in its current state. I am arguing, on many levels, against the systematic effort to change that, which is based on nothing more than humanistic or tribalistic whim, not sound analysis of real-world and environmental outcome. I am arguing against “cultural relativism”, utopianism, the idea that our own ideologies determine what is possible (e.g., the erroneous belief that “Park carrying capacity” is an essentially relative concept)–that we can “wish away”, be it through ethics or kabbalistic practice or technology, the displacing effects that will inevitably happen when ideologies dictate our actions, whether it be a long-lived displacement of wilderness or a displacement of other humans.
This is embodied by Kierkegaard, in all of his determination and lasting benevolence: “I do not lack the courage to think a thought whole. Hitherto there has been no thought I have been afraid of; if I should run across such a thought, I hope that I have at least the sincerity to say, ‘I am afraid of this thought, it stirs up something else in me, and therefore I will not think it. If in this I do wrong, the punishment will not fail to follow.’”
Footnotes:
1) In the aforementioned absurd example of a postmodernist Messiah, the word “his”, as in “…HIS blue hair (or HIS assault-rifle sholder-strap)…”, should say “his/her/their …”
2) The phrase in the second-to-last paragraph, “(e.g., the erroneous belief that ‘Park carrying capacity’ is an essentially relative concept)” should be read with an emphasis on the words “essentially relative”, in this case meaning “fundamentally, ultimately not constrained by real-world factors; limitless”.
Well said, JB.
The various “strategies” that keep getting surveyed and spouted are blatantly obvious. Instead, it might be better to actually do something about the known issues. The #1 problem for getting younger people to move to the area is jobs, and one thing everyone agrees on is the need of reliable and fast broadband to help existing businesses grow, to attract digital entrepreneurs and remote workers, and also to enhance life for everyone who lives there. I suggest these companies start figuring out how to make broadband happen. I commented in another thread that Elon Musk’s Starlink might be one answer to the problem. https://www.starlink.com/