TAYLORSVILLE, NC

Wow! A loss of agriculture jobs have decimated many communities in North Carolina.

Dr. Paul Cleveland's website is here: www.boundarystone.org

If you drive around the state of North Carolina these days, you might be a little baffled. Sure, there’s a lot of talk about how fast the Raleigh area is growing, and how much money is flowing into Charlotte. The coast might be the best coast in the country. But as you drive around many of the rural areas of this state, you’ll see some communities falling apart. Entire counties in some parts of the state have gone from prosperous to poverty in a manner of decades. It’s estimated that 6% of the entire state of North Carolina lives in a distressed community just like this.

The midwest and parts of the northeast have the rust belt - you know - places like Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo that have fallen on hard times since the auto industry left. In this video, we’re going to drive through what has been called the Rot Belt. They are places in the south that were former agriculture hubs, but have been decimated now that farming isn’t as profitable and as a result, so many of these small communities are, well, rotting away.

Aww the Rot Belt. You could draw up a rough approximation as to where the economic decline of North Carolina is the worst and people could argue about where the exact boundaries are. But for the sake of perspective, the area we’ll be focusing on is here - an area in the north central part of the state along the Virginia state line and here in the southwestern part of the state along the south carolina border. The area I’ll drive through is the latter - and I’ll specifically focus on Robeson County. But we’ll see footage of other rot belt hubs in this state. All of the areas we’re driving through are still surrounded by farmland just like this.

Robeson County has some of the poorest and forsaken communities in North Carolina. Right now, we’re in the community of Parkton, population 435. There are abandoned homes all over the place and other streets that look like they’ll be all but wiped away at some point. It’s a patchwork of homes, empty and overgrown lots, abandoned streets and empty storefronts.

About 1 in 4 people here in Parkton lives at or below the poverty line, and that number’s going up as time goes on. A whopping 75% of kids live in poverty here. There’s a bunch of houses that have sold here for well under $25,000.

Parkton is decaying right before our eyes. Like many other towns in eastern North Carolina, it’s a shadow of its former bustling self. The biggest reasons for the decay are a loss of textile mill jobs and a dramatic downtown in tobacco farming.

Then all these big corporations have moved in and THEY handle all the farming needs now. Of course, they don’t have a connection to the land or the community -they just want to make a profit.

The decline of the economic fortunes in places like Parkton have also impacted the region’s health outcomes. The average life expectancy for people here is about 73 years, while 100 miles away in Wake County, where Raleigh is, folks live to be about 81 years. A real big difference.

Young people here in Robeson County experience a death rate that’s 60% higher than the state average, and the homicide rate here is more than triple the state average.

Leaders who manage these communities always try the same things to turn things around here - you know - asking the state for more money for the struggling schools, more money to attract new businesses, and more money to boost agriculture production. Sometimes they get the money, sometimes they don’t. But it doesn’t seem to matter WHAT money comes in. The Rot Belt further rots. Sure, there are non profits and government programs in place to help the remaining small time farmers with grants and marketing their goods. But the fact is so many people in this area have just turned their backs on farming. Many forever.

And they’re not transitioning to white collar jobs either. Only 12% of the population in this part of the state has a college degree. It’s just generational here.

Some communities like this have to resort to volunteer firefighters and some will go months without a police officer until one can be lured in take the badge.

Two other distressed communities I visited in north Carolina’s rot belt were Lumberton and Kinston.

#northcarolina #moving

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