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It is the state and Federal governmental policies towards the rural areas. The governments are fine with spending money in rural areas, they just don't want them to be successful.
I will give you a example.
In the 1930's, the county I live in asked the Seattle based electric company to extend electrical lines into rural areas of the county.
They said NO. We will NEVER do it.
The County said, fine and promptly condemned the privately held dam and set up a local Public Utility District(PUD) to provide electricity to ALL county residents. Yeah, there was WAY MORE electricity generated by that dam than the local residents could use.
The County then sold the "excess" electricity back to Seattle utility.
Fast forward 60 years. Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) told the County PUD that they had to provide fiber optic lines from the now THREE county owned dams, and other facilities to Portland, Oregon.
That was fine. The PUD then noticed that it was running fiber past county offices and schools and said hey, we will just give our schools and county offices HIGH SPEED INTERNET.
Then somebody at the PUD said, "well, we are providing electricity to our county residents, how about we throw in high speed internet, telephone service, and cable TV for really cheap prices"
In rural areas, it is the local government that has the capital resources for major projects. There are very few very rich businesses that can raise significant amounts of capital. In this case, the fiber project was funded by electricity sales to Seattle, Portland, Eugene, and California.
Then it hit the fan.
The Democrat Socialist Governor of the state of Washington went ballistic. He invoked the mantle of PRIVATE ENTERPRISE and loudly "proclaimed throughout Washington state that there were certain things a GOVERNMENT should NEVER DO and high speed internet was the most important thing that should be kept in private hands."
The very conservative Republican Speaker of the House in Wenatchee thundered back "that it is OUR GOVERNMENT and we can do whatever we want with it to provide services to our citizens".
The whole thing was both serious and funny.
But clearly, the Socialist Governor was NOT interested in rural economic development if it hindered his political contributors namely the telecommunication companies.
Twenty-five years later, the County provides my internet, cable TV, and telephone service through a locally owned company operating on the County fiber optic network. Just this year, a Seattle company bought out a local company and is also operating on the fiber network.
Bad news for the area. Loss of local control.
more to follow if your interested.....
509, if you're interested, I recommend reading up on the Economic Theory of Regulation, specifically the work of George Stigler, an economist who won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work in this field (and he was a "native son" of Seattle and received his BA from UW, btw). He was a brilliant economist (I had the good fortune to take a course on the Economics of Regulation from him many decades ago).
TL;DR -- follow the money.
The reason I suggest this area to read is Stigler developed much of the framework of "Regulatory Capture", showing that governmental regulation is "an economic good" in the same sense as wheat & corn. And, just like wheat & corn, there are both supply curves for and demand curves for governmental regulation along with everything that implies.
Most importantly, Stigler showed empirically that much new governmental regulation is "demanded" by the entities being regulated so as to protect their economic interests from outside competition (for example). A classic case is ending Television advertising of cigarette commercials - this was in fact "demanded" (lobbied) by Big Tobacco themselves, and proposed legislation was fought by TV networks and local TV stations. The hearings in Congress, however, focused instead on Big Tobacco asserting that TV advertising of Cigarettes unduly influence children. That, while true, was irrelevant, of course; Big Tobacco had learned that TV advertising of Cigarettes was game-theoretic and zero-sum: each brand, if it didn't participate in TV advertising, would lose market share to another existing brand - so they all advertised. However, the sum of advertising did not expand the size of the market (size of pie). The only winners were the TV networks & stations. So their solution was to lobby congress to ban TV advertising - and Stigler's analysis of Big Tobacco financials, after the fact, showed the market didn't shrink and profit increased as the companies didn't sink gazillions of dollars into TV commercials.
Stigler's framework of the Economics of Regulation - improved over the decades by many good economists - can help explain the actions occurring that you describe.
Sorry for the late reply, spent some time listening to Cheap Land Colorado on Audible to get up to speed on it more. I think a more proper lens to look at it through is that private property needs public services to derive value and have people actually plop down. Public land is just a version of a public service. So the reason TX can do fine is there are plenty of other public services available to derive value from a said piece of land. Since the climate, remoteness, and local area of Costilla county doesn't lend itself to get value from production means, public land is the alternative to derive value through recreation and leisure potential. And it works, by looking at Custer County next door.
The other lens to look at it through is that Costilla county is the last of the great homesteading experience of the US. The common theme is it spurned development and provided an option to those who were essentially out of options. But in all cases, there's quite a bit of mess to clean up from the complete laissez faire approach, moreso than if there was some coordination. And you can see this in the way Washington state developed vs Kentucky, Washington is just laid out better and has less micro towns with no real function.
I worked for the Forest Service and actually prepared economic reports on local, regional, and state economics and how they performed and inter-related to each other.
The Forest Service had a great research arm and for years published peer reviewed studies on what makes a successful rural community. Over the years, the studies had a clear theme. Currently, successful rural communities are the ticket.
During the baby boom housing crises, timber communities were the successful ones. Get a supply of timber and your community will be successful. Until the Northern Spotted Owl comes along and your suddenly a community with serious problems.
These days the "successful" communities cater to rich folks and have Wilderness surrounding them and they are located along the inter-state highway system. Bozeman, Montana is the current "successful" community example.
As a rural resident I suspect most of us would prefer living in a successful Roseberg, Oregon than a Bozeman, Montana.
It will be interesting to see what the NEXT successful rural community types will be discovered by economists.
One characteristic of successful communities that is impossible to characterize easily is the people themselves.
Successful rural communities have successful people committed to the community. That provides an incredible amount of resilience economically.
Here is a very successful community, that breaks the mold. The people made in successful in spite of all efforts to destroy their existing economic structure.
Another factor in the decline of rural communities is the centralization of America.
We have fewer businesses, fewer governmental offices, and even fewer schools. And almost all the decline has occurred in rural areas.
I moved to a small town in 1985 with a trading area of about 40,000 people. The ONLY large store was the local K-Mart. Everything else was provided by a small business locally owned and managed.
The town started growing and currently the trading area is about 150,000 people. All the local lumber yards, office supply stores, local grocery stores, motels, hotels, department stores, and others are now OWNED and operated by out of town corporations. Retirees moved in by the bus load prompting a boom in medicare care which promptly was taken over by a non-local entity.
The lower rungs of a business have gone missing. Payroll, personnel, purchasing, etc. are now done outside the local area.
Even government got into the act.
The Forest Service closed several Ranger Stations and moved them to larger communities. The state government followed by closing offices and moving them to larger cities, and as the school age population drops we are now facing school closures as well. The post office is closing their facilities as well.
The town was very successful in 1985. It is still viewed that way today, but it is no longer "locally owned" or operated. It is now a typical urban area.
During the Northern Spotted Owl crises a state economist visited me and asked what the state of Washington could do to help the affected communities.
My answer was simple.
Take the lower paid clerical and "processing" jobs in state government and move them to rural communities. Those folks will become some of the best paid and educated folks in the community. The government jobs will provide a floor and stability to the community during economic swings.
That went over like a lead balloon. Government wants to help rural communities, ONLY if it has no impact on current urban areas. Those jobs would not be missed in urban areas.
This book is worth reading. It is about a community inside the National Forest area of influence. The Forest Service and myself considered it a "successful" community. A model for rural development.
After reading the book I think it is more a model for a "urban created rural apocalypse" where rural residents are marginalized in the community there were born into and can no longer live in the area.
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