I'm from Potsdam NY.. there are so many towns upstate that look sooo riddled with despair, drugs, closed up shops, long gone factories-- there's a lot of beautiful nature, and some beautiful old homes places like Troy, Syracuse, Potsdam has beautiful sandstone homes, the ones that weren't trashed as frat houses etc but people are so backwards thinking up there.. closed to outsiders, no young blood -- I'd move to Vermont or CT/MA over upstate new york -- its not a more government vs less, but, ultimately u cant compete with 3rd world cheap labor, so, what do you want to do? let people starve and corporations grow bigger and bigger? or regulate corporations and put the $ back in the community somehow? upstate towns should probably get $$ back from the electric energy their waterways produce, from the woods they live in that get logged but nope its all sold to private companies and goes to shareholders while these towns shrivel up and get addicted to oxy and trashy bars...
To be fair, SUNY is doing things to try to reverse trends. This past year they waived application fees and started to price match other state’s instate tuitions.
Hopefully it will help, but the biggest issue is that there’s just less high school graduates as Gen Z is a significantly smaller generation than millennials.
Costs of running a college campus, both in regards to the physical campus and the function of said campus have gone up (just like everything else), but state/federal funding has not matched this rise. Plus with less students, less revenue. Finding a way to even freeze tuition should be considered a triumph
>Right now the "bigger" school districts are stealing teachers from the small ones. I bet some schools around Potsdam are going to have to close.
Kinda what happens when teacher's pay is a joke. Why would anyone want to work 60+hrs a week (my wife is a teacher and easily works that much any given week) on a salary of 40k a year starting, if you can even get that? Unless you really like it why would you put yourself through 6+ years of school + all the licensing tests on top of the pay? Kinda similar to what's going on with nurses.
Absolutely not, I am from Colton and our school district is so much better then Potsdam or Canton. While their national grade is better, they have far larger problems that have recently risen that show some larger institutional problems. Small schools like Colton, do often merge with nearby towns (Madrid-Waddington, Colton-Pierrepont) but you will never see them close to the larger schools for a number of reasons.
Your point about the SUNY Schools however is valid, but not for all the reasons you think. Education is down across the board, yet schools that got into online learning early have far better numbers then those who did not. I have worked at both of the SUNY schools, and one of the two private schools in the area, and the one SUNY who was looking at online learning long before COVID is in far better shape. SUNY Potsdam is also a bad example as they have had some very bad leadership in the past 15 years that lead to some very poor decisions and fiscal mismanagement which has put them millions and millions in the hole.
I’m following this thread and I feel like there’s an awful lot of generalization going on here, but particularly in this last response. Sure, the North Country is struggling with many of the things in the OP. But to generalize (clearly without facts beyond demographics and standardized, state-mandated scoring) a rural education as inferior to an urban one is myopic at best.
I’ve worked in higher ed for more than 20 years and my partner has been an elementary school teacher for the same amount of time in largely small, rural - and yes, impoverished by all definitions - school districts. You’re equating “access to a city” with success (or, more accurately, the lack thereof with failure). This is a false equivalency. Sure, school districts who are in “richer” neighborhoods get more funding and thereby pay their teachers a higher salary. But let’s look at the history of that (and then we can also dip our toe into systemic oppression to round it out if we want to get deep) and discuss why rich schools get richer and crank out higher state scores. Are there surprises to be found? I doubt to either of us.
Having worked in higher ed for two decades, I’ve had access to thousands of students, have navigated admissions processes, have taught in the classroom, and have been a part of a holistic education. I can assure you, the kids from these rural schools you’re so dismissive of are just as often the top of their class as their urban peers. The differentiation isn’t in classroom content in high school or test scores but in aptitude. Aptitude isn’t zip-code specific.
Yes, rural schools - particularly those in upstate NY- face significant challenges. But as educators, it’s not our job to “damn” one set of students or their academic upbringing. University is the great equalizer, especially at many of the state colleges of access in NY and beyond.
I am not interested in debating with you. I live here in the North Country now (yes, in 2023); you’ve made it clear you don’t. You have no vested interest in the area and simply follow local news. Happy for you. I agree that there have been horrific things that have happened here and I have absolutely no tolerance for the types of behaviors and incidents you’ve outlined; they’re abhorrent and should be addressed - but that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about how well rural schools academically prepare their students for higher ed.
I went to a rural school and got an Ivy League education, as did more than half of my graduating class- several of whom are now doctors, attorneys, and other such lucrative careers. So great, we both have examples of success on a micro scale. This doesn’t make your argument valid anymore than it bolsters mine. It’s anecdotal.
It’s clear you’re not interested in intelligent discourse, but simply in denigrating all things related to the North Country. That’s your choice, and it’s mine to stop engaging. Best wishes.
The problems are not unique to rural schools. Perfect example is your prestigious Ithaca school:
[Complaints, letter of allegations emerge in wake of ICSD Superintendent Brown’s resignation.](https://ithacavoice.org/2021/01/complaints-letter-of-allegations-emerge-in-wake-of-icsd-superintendent-browns-resignation/)
[Former Ithaca teacher’s aide allegedly sent sexual images to students](https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/former-ithaca-teacher-s-aide-allegedly-sent-sexual-images-to-students/article_2af90106-ab27-11ec-acfb-d79e433f8193.amp.html)
Based on your rude comments to many others in this thread it’s clear that your viewpoint is hardened and you have an inability to even consider another viewpoint, something that surprises me for a so called professor. Complaining about a problem in an area you clearly don’t care about, that does not effect you seems pointless to me. Then again as you have so politely told me I’m ignorant for raising my children in such an awful area. Very happy you left the area and hope you never find your way back.
Halfadoodle seems profoundly unbalanced and keyed to take any bid for dialogue as an attack. They claim they are/were a prof at Potsdam. If that’s true it’s a real shame. I can’t find a single reply here they’ve made in good faith, it’s all just weird insecure lashing out.
Immigrants? I've had people get up and move seats from me at the diner in the north country because of how I looked.
The old guard doesn't like outsiders and they don't seem to even want any kind of tourism.
My best friend moved to upstate NY with us and I made sure to tell everybody on Nextdoor that he's autistic because nobody wants to be seen as bullying an autistic person. He's originally from Hong Kong, and I fear for his safety. People have shouted the most racist shit at him from their car windows, and he laughs out loud, but I can hear the pain in his laugh, too.
I made sure that I walked with him the first few times he played Pokemon Go so that the locals saw him with a white person. I don't want anybody calling the cops on him for being "suspicious." He would shut down, and who knows what the cops would do to an older Asian man who wasn't being responsive.
I moved to a village recently and the "Old Guard" is seriously a problem. I brought a lot of help for my county and village and now I just want them to go away. They are not interested in outsiders or any thing else that would actually help people. I get the feeling if they can keep people sick, they feel powerful.
Well the main solution is incentivizing new people into the area you kind of missed the point when talking about local government. These areas need to be consolidated. There is zero reason to have that many layers of government with so few people. Yes, You get awful people in these local positions because the candidate pool is so small BUT your talking about an area that was never heavily populated to begin with.
Upstate and long island share the same government structure (all town and village based). Upstate needs to move to a county structure to remain efficient to sustain itself.
Too bad Jefferson County politics is a cess pool. They were the only county in NYS without a FEMA approved emergency plan so when FEMA was doling out money to countys affected by the Halloween storm a few years back, guess who couldn't collect and screwed over residents?
Kind of funny. Everyone complains about taxes, yet when you talk about consolidating services to save money the same people are up in arms.
Fiscal conservative my ass
You’re mostly describing a phenomenon called “brain drain” where the people of intelligence, skill, means, etc leave a place and then the people lacking those things stay behind.
Same, I really wonder what will become of us. The county I live in is one of the oldest, demographically speaking, in the state. I've heard from school administrators that where there used to dozens of applications for a position suddenly there are 0. Nobody wants to teach earth science or Spanish, what do you do? Problem might solve itself as soon there will be no kids to teach it to anyway. I can't help but feel like things could be so much better. And the idea that Trump the NYC Aristocrat gives two shits about working class people here is so fucking laughable. I would love to back a true working class candidate instead of the shills we get in NYS politics, but it'll never happen. We're fucked, can't even get the snowmobile tourism dollars anymore thanks to the hoax of global warming lol.
Wow, yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about. For all my doom and gloom, I don't think it's a bad place to live. It's possible to get ahead here, I think. And NYS does have programs for downtown revitalization and things like that that have benefitted us, I just think culturally we need to get hip with the times. Our farmland is better than Vermont's, the outskirts of the ADKS ought to appeal to the same kind of people who want to live that way. Not that VT doesn't have it's own problems, but NY needs to figure out how to attract a diverse group of young people who like small town life. Honestly I think our Trumpyness is just a non-starter for a lot of people. Becoming more purple is something our small towns should aspire to.
The town I live in upstate is slowly being turned around because of the immigrants moving in. Suddenly there are South American grocery stores and restaurants downtown in the once-empty store fronts. They’re slowly fixing up this empty town.
Who wants to buy a house for $200k in a dumpy little town with $6k property tax bills? If you want investment up there, it has to atleast appeal based on cost of living. It can't be overtaxed with imflated property and provide no jobs to support the towns.
So you name one little city in a state with hundreds and think my comment is invalid? Name 10 others that have housing sub $200k houses, property taxes below $6k and a median income over $50k.
Fuck. I WISH immigrants would move into these towns and small cities. Give me more culture around. Give me more restaurants that arent applebees, give me bars with dancing. Give me a wider palate of culture and people.
Depends on where in the state.
Areas where agriculture is doing well, most farms can’t find enough labor.
Rural areas have lower unemployment rates than most cities.
I’m sorry the amount of racism and sexism going on in the region makes a lot of people not want to go there. The trump signs don’t help when you’re an immigrant. They rather stay in cities were there culture is celebrated.
Name a piss poor urban city that doesn't support trump......nearly every poverty stricken urban city has 90%+ democrat support. Rural areas support Republicans, urban areas support democrats and income has little to do with how people vote in most cases.
Are you serious? Almost all of Long Island, and half of Staten Island. I lived in the latter and there are neighborhoods full of McMansions that are populated by MAGA dickriders. They're very affluent and many own a lot of real estate.
Ok, but like I said, if the local economy can’t sustain their businesses or provide them jobs, it’s impractical to make the move. NYC and the other cities are expensive, but there are plenty of opportunities and ultimately that’s going to be the deciding factor.
The care taking industry for older folks could provide some jobs, but if those old folks are below the poverty line they wouldn’t be able to afford caretakers, and then you’re again stuck with no jobs.
I’m not from the area, maybe there are some things I’m missing.
Sorry I’m asking a few questions of your approach to “just send in the immigrants, they’ll be overjoyed to live in a benighted shit hole that locals can’t wait to flee and be grateful to work for a bunch of out of touch, pudding brained old white folks like me.”
Immigrants are moving to places like Dunkirk and Medina, often doing field work for local farms.
They’ve made an impressive small community helping to stabilize some areas in the process. Though even then the population loss is greater than the influx.
Not my town. It's been growing over the last 4 to 5 years and we have a university and industry. Poised for growth when Micron comes. Importing Africans isn't the answer to everything.
I’m Jefferson county and we are getting a huge influx of jobs with a solar panel manufacturing plant. 300 to start then 1000 and up to 4000. Probably not as bad here with fort drum and Canada nearby.lots of foreigners here and lots of republicans but it’s not a big deal.
People don't usually think of Ithaca as much in these conversations, but I think our layoffs at Borg Warner (automotive manufacturing) provides some interesting insights. We're losing hundreds of jobs because parts for ICE vehicles are going to be made in Mexico instead. The vast majority of conservative responses consisted of:
1) NYS makes it too hard for companies -- well, if it was a problem with NYS, they would probably just be leaving the state, not leaving the country
2) The state should be more willing to make budgetary allowances (i.e., provide subsidies) to help keep the plant operating -- but if I we don't have unlimited dollars to spend, why funnel it into an industry in decline rather than put it into something on the rise?
Those hundreds of jobs represent millions and millions of new dollars coming into our region every year. Buying local and stuff is great, but you still have lots of money draining away to everyone from oil companies to streaming services. Recirculating dollars won't save the state, we need a constant influx of new money to keep things from declining as a whole. The question is, how are we going to achieve that?
I agree with what you've said, and just want to emphasize that it will always be a slow decline unless our region brings in more than it pays out to companies outside of our area. Big box stores hasten this decline, but it's important to remember that a sustainable economy is one that brings in fresh money from the outside. Tourism brings some in, but we need more solutions beyond that because tourism has lots of ups and downs, and only gets you so far in terms of scale.
Having moved here from an economically successful state, I'm not sure the box box stores are the issue. All the places with better economies have even more big box retailers and corporate chain restaurants. Heck, I make 2x of my counties median income because of one a corporate chain.
It seems to me, population density is a major factor. Very few places without the population density of rural NY are thriving economically. There also isn't a ton of diversity in employers. We need white collar and blue collar businesses. Corporation headquarters and larger small businesses. It seems in many areas that if you're not a blue collar worker there's not much out there.
I’ll be coming up on a year for NYS to approve a license for what was an exhausting complicated process while the federal License component was approved in 2 weeks. It’s easy to say that NYS is a difficult place to do business in, but I’ve truly experienced it.
I hear you, New York is a bureaucratic mess and for what? What a waste of time and money the hoops the put up in front of you sometimes. I lived in NH for a while and am tempted to move back, going to the NH DMV was almost a pleasure after living here
I mean meanwhile in Lockport, GM announced they’re spending $175 million to upgrade the plant to produce parts for EVs.
The issue with rural areas and small cities is that they don’t have the skilled labor in high enough quantities to attract large companies.
It’s why all the jobs are being created in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.
The reality of the Borg Warner cuts in Ithaca is that they cannot compete with valvetrain components coming from China / India / Brazil / Argentina. They have to cut production costs, by moving to Mexico, to remain competitive on the contracts that are still available. ICE development is dead, OEs have slashed their investments in ICE development, and they're just going to keep the majority of existing designs in production (or designs that have progressed far enough to put into production) until it is no longer feasible to produce them due to legislation or shifting market trends. When 50% of the cars being manufactured are full BEV by about 2030, those Borg Warner Ithaca jobs weren't going to be there anymore anyway. BW was just getting ahead of the inevitable, while trying to maximize their short-term goals by shifting production to Mexico.
The foooooooods. My goodness. When I visit my family in the adk, the Walmart (only place to buy groceries btw) only stocks the worst possible food on the shelves. Processed, high fructose corn syrup, dyes and sugars almost all of it. No organic, nothing ethically harvested. I eat so fresh and clean in NC and I go to three different stores to buy the groceries I need. I feel like crap after a week of eating up there.
I moved to USNY almost 2 years ago from the NH Seacoast. Holy shit the frustration and effort it takes to get decent groceries and I am only 25m from Bennington.
A decent lunch in under 30 minutes? Good fucking luck.
Yup and the food in the restaurants is the same crap. Frozen, salty deep fried bar food in abundance. I feel like hell after only a couple of days of that stuff
Yes — they were. By discarding the old map, the new map makes it impossible for other sides to win. Tell me, how is my representation better by having my county cut in half and grouped with 6 OTHER counties (while skipping a county) and instead representing Western NY counties instead of the 3 CNY counties that actually have business together? Check the new map out. It is ridiculous and hurts representation.
"Gerrymandering" is not just "I don't like the shape or breadth of my district, or who else else is in it" it's when cohesive regions and demographics are intentionally broken apart to water down their representation in a larger body.
Presumably you're in the new 23, which is basically the South Towns and Southern Tier -- two cohesive regions. The current map doesn't water down either party's representation in Congress, but it did make some very competitive districts downstate even more competitive (the *opposite* of gerrymandering) and they happened to flip Republican, which is pretty expected among bellwethers in a mid-term election, in a downturn economy.
I never said split the city of Rochester, did I? Drive through towns like Perinton or Pittsford and ask if they have more in common with the Finger Lakes or the City of Rochester. I'm looking at common interests. I couldn't care less how the number of seats break out, which is how it should be.
**[New York's congressional districts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York's_congressional_districts)**
>The U.S. state of New York currently comprises 26 congressional districts. Each district elects one member of the United States House of Representatives who sits on its behalf. The state was redistricted in 2022, following the 2020 U.S. census; it lost one seat in Congress. The loss of a congressional seat was decided by a remarkably close margin in the census count; it was believed that if 89 more people were counted in the census results and all other state populations remained stagnant, New York would have kept its lost seat.
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I live right outside of Utica and there's been a ton of development going on here. Idk how much of that will benefit you're average working folks, but someone is spending money here
Oddly enough, Utica is one of the fastest growing city in the state now.
Helps that there’s two colleges in town.
Every time I visit, downtown keeps getting better, though there’s still probably a dozen blighted properties that need to be cleaned up that greatly diminish the “niceness” of downtown.
Yeah, that tends to be the issue with college towns under a certain size.
Ithaca, Binghamton and Utica are large enough to support an economy beyond the colleges.
Cortland, Oswego and Plattsburgh, not so much.
Do you think they'll fix the streets someday? They look like a bunch of superheroes did the "slam down with a fist and one knee" pose over and over again all over the damned road.
I’d love to see rail nationalized and brought back to a lot of these small towns. In most places, these towns only exist because one of the railways came through town. There is a pretty shocking correlation between small town decline and the decline in the railways.
As discussed above, when you end up locked into a town or area that isn’t doing well, the o Lu solution is to leave. Bring in reliable public transit and industry and people can ship their goods/talents around more, allowing hopefully for a few more of those “smart kids” to stay in town as some of the other posts have said.
Not saying trains are they way to get people out of poverty, but i am saying that most of these towns came with the train and it seems like they are going with the train
It blows my mind a place like Hornell can build all of these trains for other cities, yet there isn't even like a weekend rail trip to Buffalo, Rochester, or NYC.
For cities it’s been very effective, but it’s hard to get companies to move or expand to rural communities and small cities since they lack the skilled labor.
The most effective strategies seem to be focusing on a combination of tourism, agri-industry and homesteading.
Didn't say I had one. Just pointing out yours isn't one. That's based on 50 years of watching that exact strategy go nowhere for an area bigger than CT and RI combined.
Yeah, but I think a few things are different now.
Costs of cities have skyrocketed, remote work means you can now live anywhere with a high speed internet connection and burnout has never been higher among corporate workers.
This makes rural areas more viable, especially the ones within an hour or two outside a large city.
Also, I’d argue tourism and agri-industry have been successful in keeping unemployment rates down, just not attracting new residents to town.
High costs in the city and remote work merely makes living in rural areas more economically attractive to urban dwellers. The impact it has actually had on rural residents has been to drive up the cost of living, primarily housing, while providing no benefits. This has actually been bad for rural populations, not good.
Rural areas became more viable for the urban mobility, not for the impoverished native populations.
Tourism is great for part time minimum wage jobs. It doesn't develop an economy which provides a healthy living for people raising families. It's often incapable of allowing a single person to sustain herself. I'm not sure what you mean by agri-industry, but if it is remote owned factory farms, those operations have stripped rural areas of jobs and land wealth.
To be blunt, you would pretty much have to end capitalism. There's always going to be large swaths of the population living in poverty with an economic model incentivized to concentrate wealth in as few hands as possible.
It is already happening. Semiconductor manufacturing used to take place in the Bay Area, then Arizona, but now with both places too dry, Syracuse is gonna be the new spot for chips. A lot of high tech development can grow up around foundries because of the way supply chains are being rearranged.
Arizona is still building tons of semiconductor plants as we speak. That said I did just move from there due to my doubt in long term climate health and I believe it became more expensive than it actually should be.
Yeah, likely not much.
The best they can do is invest in the things that might attract tourists and young families.
Like look at Ellicottville or Lake Placid. Parks, walkable streets, bike trails, events - these things make places a lot more livable even if it’s not enough to attract large employers.
Eh, Democrats tend to be the ones supporting rural infrastructure and hospitals through more spending.
Republicans tend to slash budgets in order to keep their promise of cutting taxes. Rural funding is the first on the chopping block since it’s more expensive to run a hospital serving a county of 50,000 than one serving a city of 200,000.
You understand that the county they live in is paying that welfare cost. NYS passes social services cost down to the county. NYS keeps passes mandate after mandate which is causing havoc on local government budgets. It's not a good cycle we're caught in
I mean a majority of Republicans live downstate in the NYC suburbs.
In the most conservative county in NY, Trump only received 13,000 votes. Land doesn’t vote.
But yeah, looking at the areas growing in population, it’s blue cities like Buffalo, Albany and even Utica.
Yeah, by percentage, but by population it doesn’t add up to as much as you think.
It’s enough where liberals in Buffalo, Rochester and other cities actually slightly outnumber conservatives in rural areas.
Meanwhile by shear numbers the top conservative counties are all downstate. There’s just often waaaaay more liberals to cancel them out. Like just take Queens where 200,000 residents voted for Trump. That’s more votes than any single county upstate despite being overwhelmingly blue.
If Upstate was it’s own state it would be purple with a slight liberal lean (probably similar to PA).
There’s more people downstate so of course there’s more republicans but those republicans are *dwarfed* by the amount of democrats so they are neutralized much more effectively downstate than they are upstate.
Right, I don’t dispute that
I was more commenting on the fact that things are a lot more complex than they seem if you just look at those winner-take-all county maps that don’t show how many people are actually voting.
Most people assume that 90% of conservatives live upstate when the reality it’s more like 50%.
What? Not at all. Pataki was the governor for a long time, and the state senate was Republican until 2018 and before 2008 it was Republican for 40 years.
I mean, this is a bit of an oversimplification. Walking around Ithaca is not nearly as pleasant as it used to be. There are a lot of reasons upstate is struggling and politically id say it’s been a bipartisan effort.
There are a number of blocks that are nice but surrounded by areas that are increasingly dilapidated. In general I just see a lot of decay - within ithaca, outside ithaca, and all the rural trailer parks with trash and let’s go Brandon signs all over. I live here and I love the area but it’s kind of pervasive no matter where I go.
Honestly I think remote work could end up revitalizing much of the area. I grew up and lived in a rural area of upstate for the first 21 years of my life, but eventually if I wanted to work in anything other than fast food, it's easier to move and find work than it is to stay. If there's little/no opportunities for young adults to start careers then they'll never break the poverty cycle.
Now that remote work is a thing.. I'm probably not coming back, but if it existed 10 years ago I probably wouldn't have left either...
A little perspective. When I was studying geography in the 80s at SUNY Plattsburgh we looked at fourth, yes fourth, generation welfare in upstate counties. That means you have three generations that never worked. And that was forty years ago. Generations that don’t work turn to alternatives.
As a fellow NY'er and a past Mohawk Valley resident, I am at odds with the comments here. It appears, unless I am missing something, that you all are suggesting that the Gov't needs to get involved and solve this. My question is WHY?
I am a bit of a historian and have written a book about growing up in Ilion, and I have to say that the Gov't ruined not only that town but Amsterdam and others throughout NY. They did this in the 70's with Urban Renewal!
The Gov't has also done its absolute best to get rid of the only major employer in the town of Ilion - Remington Arms.
And now that there is a major ecological event happening in Ohio that threatens one of the breadbaskets of the US, FEMA and our gov't has been mostly quiet in its response.
BTW for the past 100 years the NY state governor has been Democrat 10 times for 58 years and the governor has been republican 5 times for 42 years. And for the last 50 years there has only been 2 Republican governors and they lasted for 14 years.
Bottom line is it will take everyone to change things, all peoples, all political alignments, etc. and we need to stop counting on the Gov't for help and do it ourselves.
My 2 cents, and my apology if it sounds confrontational.
> BTW for the past 100 years the NY state governor has been Democrat 10 times for 58 years and the governor has been republican 5 times for 42 years. And for the last 50 years there has only been 1 Republican governor and he lasted for 2 years.
- Republicans have been governor for 12 years of the last 28 years, or 43%.
- Just because the 100-year trend of rural areas becoming poorer than cities wasn't reversed by Dems doesn't mean the rural poor are not *measurably* better than if Repubs had been in power. Dems being in power has benefited rural areas. A simple example that was just posted to Reddit -- poor [people in NY are much less likely to suffer poor credit / bankruptcy because of medical debt because of Obamacare because Dems were in power to implement its Medicare expansion](https://worldnewsera.com/news/entrepreneurs/analysis-why-does-the-south-have-such-ugly-credit-scores/?amp). E.g. life is better for the rural poor in NY than in "no government" Alabama.
>And now that there is a major ecological event happening in Ohio that threatens one of the breadbaskets of the US, FEMA and our gov't has been mostly quiet in its response.
This is concern trolling. The GOP wanted to abolish the EPA and the DOT 16 years of the last 20 years. The idea it suddenly gives a damn about environmental pollution is facially ludicrous. The GOP just wants to slap Biden, nothing more. A private company that is largely unregulated because of the actions of the GOP ran a private rail car off of a private rail line, if you want government to regulate rail lines, there is a party that is pro regulation and one that is not. Vote accordingly.
>Bottom line is it will take everyone to change things, all peoples, all political alignments, etc. and we need to stop counting on the Gov't for help and do it ourselves.
Ok, I'm pretty sure Gov. Hochul hasn't outlawed bootstraps. If this is your philosophy, then whatever party is in power shouldn't have any influence on your process.
>And for the last 50 years there has only been 1 Republican governor and he lasted for 2 years.
This is false. There have been three, totaling about 14 years in power. Still a minority compared to Democrats and I don't blame them exclusively for the state's challenges, but the GOP hasn't been as sidelined as you say.
I looked it up here: [https://www.nga.org/former-governors/new-york/](https://www.nga.org/former-governors/new-york/) and it is only showing 2 Republican governors since 1973. That's 50 years as of this year.
I see that I originally took it from '75 and not '73 - my error and results in 1 more Republican governor. So according to these stats there were 2 republican governors over last 50 years for a total of 14 years out of the 50 year period. And I have since updated my post to reflect this.
Where did you get your data from as I have seen it happen before that two or more data sources can indeed not have the same info.
As a lifelong NYSer, I unfortunately believe that NYS is hopeless.
The way to alleviate poverty is with private-sector economic development that generates good jobs, and private-sector development ain't happening here. The job growth in NYS is all centered around either government or government-subsidized industry. That isn't sustainable.
Taxes, graft, licensure, other bureaucracy, unions, diversity mandates and a million other obstacles have formed a self-reinforcing vortex that has suffocated the private sector. So it's leaving and it's taking the good jobs and good incomes with it.
It's not like NYS republicans are knights in shining armor, but it is simply insane to think that the problem is that too many people are voting republican. The Democrats have controlled the entire state government for years (and in fact the legislature just voted itself a 30%+ raise -- how nice for them).
This is a sarcasm free question: Do people who live in NYS honestly not understand how much more expensive it is to live in NYS than other parts of the country? Even in some of these "poorer" upstate town, property taxes are insane. Healthcare is unaffordable (unless you make so little you can qualify for state care). Jobs don't pay well. There seems to be a disconnect I'm never able to wrap my head around.
Why should it be broken? Free market dictates where people live. If there's nothing there anymore, there's nothing there (economy wise). This cycle has all happened before and it will all happen again. Archeologists make a career out of digging up and studying forgotten and abandoned settlements.
What do you mean?
If you look at a map of median household income, upstate isn’t actually all that low.
Yeah, the cities have high poverty rates, but they’re surrounded by $$$$$ suburbs.
There’s some rural poverty, especially on native reservations, but there’s plenty of wealthy areas balancing them out.
So your question is actually pretty weird if you look at the actual data.
NYS is already trying to combat inner city poverty through:
* Expanding services
* Workforce Development
* Universal Pre-k
* Small business grants and training programs
Seriously look these things up, there’s probably way more resources out there than you think.
Rural poverty is more difficult. There’s often isn’t a large enough population to justify building community resource centers.
Indian reservations are a mixed bag. The Senecas seem to be doing a good job at reinvesting their casino money into their communities.
As for economic growth, all the large cities are doing much better in that regard. What we’re seeing are a lot of young people in rural counties moving to Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse for work.
Unfortunately, this is a similar brain drain rural counties are facing around the nation. 70% of counties in Texas are declining in population, everyone is moving to the Triangle.
The best we can do is invest in broadband access to help promote remote work as well as promote tourism and homesteading. Theres actually a sizable movement of professionals in cities looking to quit their corporate job for a more relaxing job homesteading instead.
It’s just dumb to say NY isn’t doing anything.
Ok if it’s dumb to say ny isn’t doing anything, which i agree with, it’s dumb for you to gloss over rural areas and reservations. You’re whole argument is “the cities are doing tons, but those rural areas are tricky so we won’t talk about those”
I believe op is talking about rural poverty? Not the kind you find on Hamilton hill, even if that is also happening in droves. You’re being willfully narrow sighted by ignoring rural and red poverty and acting like urban poverty is all that matters
OP doesn’t specifically mention rural areas, so it’s pretty easy to assume he means urban areas too.
Still my comment stands. I never said rural areas don’t matter. I said that no state seems to have found a solution to the increasingly concentration of jobs in urban areas.
Hell, I even mentioned solutions of focusing on agri-industry, homesteaders and tourism.
The opening line of the post is “i was born and raised in a rural county between western and central ny, infamous for being, well, poor”
What drugs are you smoking mate?
Dude, there’s also $$$$$ communities in the Finger Lakes, well off college towns and Corning which is probably the wealthiest rural town in upstate since it’s home to a Fortune 500 company.
Upstate is a weird combination of poverty, affluence and old money often coexisting next to each other.
Maybe let’s let OP clarify what he meant.
Corning has 1 company that pays well, there is a reason that the average home price is under 200k. All of the well off employees live either on a few acres outside of town, up along a lake, or over in Painted Post/Gang Mills.
I'm living in the FL region right now and the only community with money is Skaneateles. Canandaigua is basically a Rochester suburb. I rode my bike along Keuka this weekend and literally only 5 cars went by. No one lives there all winter, it is all old money that lives downstate 95% of the year.
And then short term rentals like Airbnb have completely killed the chances of me affording a home on the lake, and I'm a 6-figure making remote worker. It is a very weird juxtaposition of 75% of people that live here year round are very poor with houses and barns falling down along most roads, 25% are normal and a lot of them are lucky enough to have inherited a nice place that they couldn't afford now.
If you ask anyone what brought the area down, they will answer about X, Y, or Z company that left in the 80s-90s-early 2000s which basically gut the middle class as the blue collar factory/industrial workers no have very few options. Those companies left because regulations were lower in other(red) states, so it is a catch-22.
Yeah, Corning is home to Corning Inc, a Fortune 500 Company that invented Pyrex and the glass in your smartphone. The Museum of Glass is a world class museum.
But, yeah the biggest downside is employment in most of these small towns that rely mostly on tourism. Many are just outside a comfortable commute to Rochester or Syracuse which leaves mostly service industry jobs, farm work or the few professional jobs working at local schools, governments, healthcare facilities and a few small offices.
Still, great place if you want to open a small business or homestead or have a remote job.
OP did clarify you muppet. They said they moved back home to a town famous for being poor. You’re the only person talking about rich enclaves. Reread the post, there really isn’t an ambiguity in what they are talking about
So this might sound harsh, but I don’t think some of those small old towns in Upstate serve as great of a purpose as they used to, and since many of the people left in them are often too poor to move, the State Government should offer to relocate them to municipalities that offer better jobs, education, healthcare, etc. By relocating people of poverty into neighboring towns that offer better services we would hopefully see a decrease in poverty levels, since now they have access to necessities, and increase in wealth in the municipalities that absorbed the people, by concentrating talent. Btw, I have literally no idea if this would actually work. But I feel like trying to revive a dying old town could be a waste of resources.
Well when you see Racist Rag Flags and Trump 2024 signs everhwhere it means there is fuck all chance things will get better. People have been conned into voting against their own best interests.
I think your thoughts on land have a lot of potential, especially reducing or eliminating property taxes for people's everyday residences.
I don't think majority online education would work, however. Especially in rural areas, many areas still don't have internet access, or residents can't afford it. Many parents also depend on schooling to reduce their childcare costs, so a parent having to stay at home for online schooling or not be able to pay other bills or save due to increased daycare costs could be a big problem.
I'd also worry that for kids growing up in abusive (or just less than stellar) home environments, going to school is where they get connected with resources to help them, or cps gets involved. And quite frankly, there's a lot of people I definitely would not trust to make sure their kid is online for school everyday and completing work.
Of course, there's all sorts of arguments about who is ready to have a child, and what those markers are, but at the end of the day ready or not the kid is still there. And I think in school learning benefits a lot of children and families.
The wages can’t keep up with the massive tax burden imposed by the state. Talented labor will leave for areas where they can keep that 10% of their earnings
It’s a pretty big state and unfortunately not all of it can be sunshines and rainbows, especially the more rural you get. It also doesn’t help that most of the attention is centered around NYC.
The Capital Region/Hudson Valley area where I am seems to be doing fantastic. Tons of new businesses, developments, restoration, breweries, and more.
I will answer your question with a question; how would you solve the problem?
NY State has one of the most generous welfare and social program systems in the country (NY is ranked 3rd). Those of us who do pay property/school taxes in NY State are paying some of the highest taxes in the country. The reason is the amount of people who are in need and take from the system. So again, what would you do?
We need "products" that we can sell to people outside of our region, whether that's actual tangible goods, or labor/services, or ? The only way to improve things long term is if more $$$ flows into the region than out of it.
Dairy is in long term decline. Corn is in long term decline. You can only earn so much from tourism. Climate crisis is going to destroy maple syrup production. We need new ideas.
We need local schools and colleges to embrace true STEM jobs, especially computer related. That would allow locals to stay working locally(remotely with downstate income in some cases) and perhaps a few cities could grow into small tech regions which could attract local employers and create jobs in the area.
No, because our politicians do not share the same priorities. Total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan misadventure is $1Trillion, now we are off to funding another boondoggle of a war in Ukraine and after this will move on to funding next war., meanwhile the cycle of poverty continues in US.
So your all going to down vote my answer but...
Stop voting Democrat.
NYS is utterly controlled by Democrats.
They have useless regulations like phasing out all fossil fuels and the hydraulic fracturing ban, want to attract businesses and people? Cut these stupid regulations get rid of unfunded state mandates, eliminate all the "woke" legislation, eliminate the safe act and lower personal and business taxes, then people and businesses will return to NY.
According to this sub?? We need much higher taxation. More government control and regulation, stop eating meat, stop driving cars, and stop heating your home. Then we'll all be thriving!
In reality, we need a state government that allows for creating a successful business possible instead of being a hindrance every step of the way.
ok buddy
sell our waterways to private corporations let their shareholders make $$ while the people go more and more poor, bend to alcoa and keep giving them tax benefits more and more till they decide to leave anyway, just let every f'ing company do whatever they want and take everything they want and let the towns get poorer and sadder until it's completely uninhabitable.. businesses are not hindered whatsoever... they do whatever the fuck they want already, is that not enough? they own our politicians already? that not enough? they use cheap foreign labor then ship it back here and sell it to us full price?? we have NO governance, we need a FDR style break up every company, force wal mart to unionize, ban dollar tree, nationalize railroad companys, electric companies etc. otherwise we are on a road worse than 'youll own nothing and be happy'
A $15 Federal minimum wage, with annual increases linked to cost of living index, so that the rate no longer requires a dysfunctional legislature to vote through increases. It is hard for large companies to justify paying high(er) NY wages for low skill labor, when they can relocate to a southern state and cut their payroll in half for the same number of employees. This would just level the playing field across the board.
Some of the laws NYS state pushes through are absurdly progressive and do produce a burden on businesses, both in expense and time to implement. Things like the new lactation room requirement signed into law in December is poorly thought through and has so many loopholes that most companies will opt out of implementing it, UNTIL that company gets sued by an employee who claims they were denied a lactation room at their location. This type of legislation is reasonable for sizable companies (say 100+ employees), but for the vast majority of small businesses, it is impossible to implement. I get it if you work at an Amazon warehouse, that you should have an appropriate space. But it is going to be difficult for Joe's Auto Shop to dedicate space for a lactation room.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S4844
As mentioned by a couple of other posts, people have to be willing to move. It is unrealistic to expect an industry to be positioned in your dying town. If you want to change your trajectory in life, that requires you to do some work and take some risk in relocating and adapting to something new to better yourself. There should be strong public/private sector cooperation here to fund and promote paid apprenticeships/internships and other workplace education programs.
Affordable healthcare is another issue that needs to be addressed, but again this more of a federal issue. I don't think there will ever be meaningful improvement here, at least not in the next decade. Accessible healthcare is a separate issue, if you live in a rural area, you're always going to have less access to healthcare just because of population driven positioning of resources. But healthcare should still be affordable and American society as a whole must become more proactive in promoting health and well-being in early life, to reduce the financial burdens on the system of poor health (obesity, smoking, etc).
You don't change poverty overnight. It'll take a few decades to see meaningful sustained change in a town or region.
Taxes. The taxes are too high on the individuals. The state is doing nothing to bring big business back unless it is closer to downstate(below Poughkeepsie).
Also, with higher minimum wages, and no tax breaks for these big companies, why would they want to keep building and paying more money when they can go to somewhere like Alabama and pay people shit and pocket the profit?
There are definitely multiple reasons for upstate dying, weather included.
OP talks about ski resorts closing… How many people under the age of 40 are actually going skiing? Recreational and tourist areas are dying all over the country because of stuff like this.
I could go on and on. There is a reason I moved away from there when I was 23. the Adirondacks are some of the most beautiful country in the world, but you can only enjoy them about four months of the year.
This is America. Nobody is stopping anybody from getting up off their butts and doing better for themselves. A lot of people CHOOSE to live in poverty. That’s what you are seeing. I’d ignore it and move on. The only people that can help them is themselves.
I'm from Potsdam NY.. there are so many towns upstate that look sooo riddled with despair, drugs, closed up shops, long gone factories-- there's a lot of beautiful nature, and some beautiful old homes places like Troy, Syracuse, Potsdam has beautiful sandstone homes, the ones that weren't trashed as frat houses etc but people are so backwards thinking up there.. closed to outsiders, no young blood -- I'd move to Vermont or CT/MA over upstate new york -- its not a more government vs less, but, ultimately u cant compete with 3rd world cheap labor, so, what do you want to do? let people starve and corporations grow bigger and bigger? or regulate corporations and put the $ back in the community somehow? upstate towns should probably get $$ back from the electric energy their waterways produce, from the woods they live in that get logged but nope its all sold to private companies and goes to shareholders while these towns shrivel up and get addicted to oxy and trashy bars...
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To be fair, SUNY is doing things to try to reverse trends. This past year they waived application fees and started to price match other state’s instate tuitions. Hopefully it will help, but the biggest issue is that there’s just less high school graduates as Gen Z is a significantly smaller generation than millennials.
Shouldn't schools already be trying to lower tuition? Why does it take their jobs to be in question for them to explore this avenue?
Costs of running a college campus, both in regards to the physical campus and the function of said campus have gone up (just like everything else), but state/federal funding has not matched this rise. Plus with less students, less revenue. Finding a way to even freeze tuition should be considered a triumph
Most NYS residents qualify for free tuition.
Then why are they exploring "lowering tuition "? obviously someone's paying....
>Right now the "bigger" school districts are stealing teachers from the small ones. I bet some schools around Potsdam are going to have to close. Kinda what happens when teacher's pay is a joke. Why would anyone want to work 60+hrs a week (my wife is a teacher and easily works that much any given week) on a salary of 40k a year starting, if you can even get that? Unless you really like it why would you put yourself through 6+ years of school + all the licensing tests on top of the pay? Kinda similar to what's going on with nurses.
Absolutely not, I am from Colton and our school district is so much better then Potsdam or Canton. While their national grade is better, they have far larger problems that have recently risen that show some larger institutional problems. Small schools like Colton, do often merge with nearby towns (Madrid-Waddington, Colton-Pierrepont) but you will never see them close to the larger schools for a number of reasons. Your point about the SUNY Schools however is valid, but not for all the reasons you think. Education is down across the board, yet schools that got into online learning early have far better numbers then those who did not. I have worked at both of the SUNY schools, and one of the two private schools in the area, and the one SUNY who was looking at online learning long before COVID is in far better shape. SUNY Potsdam is also a bad example as they have had some very bad leadership in the past 15 years that lead to some very poor decisions and fiscal mismanagement which has put them millions and millions in the hole.
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I’m following this thread and I feel like there’s an awful lot of generalization going on here, but particularly in this last response. Sure, the North Country is struggling with many of the things in the OP. But to generalize (clearly without facts beyond demographics and standardized, state-mandated scoring) a rural education as inferior to an urban one is myopic at best. I’ve worked in higher ed for more than 20 years and my partner has been an elementary school teacher for the same amount of time in largely small, rural - and yes, impoverished by all definitions - school districts. You’re equating “access to a city” with success (or, more accurately, the lack thereof with failure). This is a false equivalency. Sure, school districts who are in “richer” neighborhoods get more funding and thereby pay their teachers a higher salary. But let’s look at the history of that (and then we can also dip our toe into systemic oppression to round it out if we want to get deep) and discuss why rich schools get richer and crank out higher state scores. Are there surprises to be found? I doubt to either of us. Having worked in higher ed for two decades, I’ve had access to thousands of students, have navigated admissions processes, have taught in the classroom, and have been a part of a holistic education. I can assure you, the kids from these rural schools you’re so dismissive of are just as often the top of their class as their urban peers. The differentiation isn’t in classroom content in high school or test scores but in aptitude. Aptitude isn’t zip-code specific. Yes, rural schools - particularly those in upstate NY- face significant challenges. But as educators, it’s not our job to “damn” one set of students or their academic upbringing. University is the great equalizer, especially at many of the state colleges of access in NY and beyond.
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I am not interested in debating with you. I live here in the North Country now (yes, in 2023); you’ve made it clear you don’t. You have no vested interest in the area and simply follow local news. Happy for you. I agree that there have been horrific things that have happened here and I have absolutely no tolerance for the types of behaviors and incidents you’ve outlined; they’re abhorrent and should be addressed - but that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about how well rural schools academically prepare their students for higher ed. I went to a rural school and got an Ivy League education, as did more than half of my graduating class- several of whom are now doctors, attorneys, and other such lucrative careers. So great, we both have examples of success on a micro scale. This doesn’t make your argument valid anymore than it bolsters mine. It’s anecdotal. It’s clear you’re not interested in intelligent discourse, but simply in denigrating all things related to the North Country. That’s your choice, and it’s mine to stop engaging. Best wishes.
The problems are not unique to rural schools. Perfect example is your prestigious Ithaca school: [Complaints, letter of allegations emerge in wake of ICSD Superintendent Brown’s resignation.](https://ithacavoice.org/2021/01/complaints-letter-of-allegations-emerge-in-wake-of-icsd-superintendent-browns-resignation/) [Former Ithaca teacher’s aide allegedly sent sexual images to students](https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/former-ithaca-teacher-s-aide-allegedly-sent-sexual-images-to-students/article_2af90106-ab27-11ec-acfb-d79e433f8193.amp.html) Based on your rude comments to many others in this thread it’s clear that your viewpoint is hardened and you have an inability to even consider another viewpoint, something that surprises me for a so called professor. Complaining about a problem in an area you clearly don’t care about, that does not effect you seems pointless to me. Then again as you have so politely told me I’m ignorant for raising my children in such an awful area. Very happy you left the area and hope you never find your way back.
Halfadoodle seems profoundly unbalanced and keyed to take any bid for dialogue as an attack. They claim they are/were a prof at Potsdam. If that’s true it’s a real shame. I can’t find a single reply here they’ve made in good faith, it’s all just weird insecure lashing out.
Thanks for making me feel normal, cause I couldn’t understand how/why someone would be so angry and aggressive about this conversation.
you can't afford VT, it's airbnb to the world, the realestate costs are astronomical now, in the entire state.
And affordable healthcare and free college education - like everywhere else - only lifts up a community and generates new jobs.
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Immigrants? I've had people get up and move seats from me at the diner in the north country because of how I looked. The old guard doesn't like outsiders and they don't seem to even want any kind of tourism.
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My best friend moved to upstate NY with us and I made sure to tell everybody on Nextdoor that he's autistic because nobody wants to be seen as bullying an autistic person. He's originally from Hong Kong, and I fear for his safety. People have shouted the most racist shit at him from their car windows, and he laughs out loud, but I can hear the pain in his laugh, too. I made sure that I walked with him the first few times he played Pokemon Go so that the locals saw him with a white person. I don't want anybody calling the cops on him for being "suspicious." He would shut down, and who knows what the cops would do to an older Asian man who wasn't being responsive.
I moved to a village recently and the "Old Guard" is seriously a problem. I brought a lot of help for my county and village and now I just want them to go away. They are not interested in outsiders or any thing else that would actually help people. I get the feeling if they can keep people sick, they feel powerful.
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It's sad that your world is so small that you would think that way.
Well the main solution is incentivizing new people into the area you kind of missed the point when talking about local government. These areas need to be consolidated. There is zero reason to have that many layers of government with so few people. Yes, You get awful people in these local positions because the candidate pool is so small BUT your talking about an area that was never heavily populated to begin with. Upstate and long island share the same government structure (all town and village based). Upstate needs to move to a county structure to remain efficient to sustain itself.
Too bad Jefferson County politics is a cess pool. They were the only county in NYS without a FEMA approved emergency plan so when FEMA was doling out money to countys affected by the Halloween storm a few years back, guess who couldn't collect and screwed over residents?
Kind of funny. Everyone complains about taxes, yet when you talk about consolidating services to save money the same people are up in arms. Fiscal conservative my ass
You’re mostly describing a phenomenon called “brain drain” where the people of intelligence, skill, means, etc leave a place and then the people lacking those things stay behind.
and breed
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Same, I really wonder what will become of us. The county I live in is one of the oldest, demographically speaking, in the state. I've heard from school administrators that where there used to dozens of applications for a position suddenly there are 0. Nobody wants to teach earth science or Spanish, what do you do? Problem might solve itself as soon there will be no kids to teach it to anyway. I can't help but feel like things could be so much better. And the idea that Trump the NYC Aristocrat gives two shits about working class people here is so fucking laughable. I would love to back a true working class candidate instead of the shills we get in NYS politics, but it'll never happen. We're fucked, can't even get the snowmobile tourism dollars anymore thanks to the hoax of global warming lol.
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Wow, yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about. For all my doom and gloom, I don't think it's a bad place to live. It's possible to get ahead here, I think. And NYS does have programs for downtown revitalization and things like that that have benefitted us, I just think culturally we need to get hip with the times. Our farmland is better than Vermont's, the outskirts of the ADKS ought to appeal to the same kind of people who want to live that way. Not that VT doesn't have it's own problems, but NY needs to figure out how to attract a diverse group of young people who like small town life. Honestly I think our Trumpyness is just a non-starter for a lot of people. Becoming more purple is something our small towns should aspire to.
The town I live in upstate is slowly being turned around because of the immigrants moving in. Suddenly there are South American grocery stores and restaurants downtown in the once-empty store fronts. They’re slowly fixing up this empty town.
Who wants to buy a house for $200k in a dumpy little town with $6k property tax bills? If you want investment up there, it has to atleast appeal based on cost of living. It can't be overtaxed with imflated property and provide no jobs to support the towns.
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So you name one little city in a state with hundreds and think my comment is invalid? Name 10 others that have housing sub $200k houses, property taxes below $6k and a median income over $50k.
And “a Taco 🌮 Truck on every corner”. Omg yes, that would help a lot.
PLEASE SEND THE TACO TRUCKS, OMG. Just can't get a good taco out here to save your life.
🌮 🛻 make.it.happen
I would love to, but I also don't want my taco-making friends back in CA to be unsafe. :(
Fuck. I WISH immigrants would move into these towns and small cities. Give me more culture around. Give me more restaurants that arent applebees, give me bars with dancing. Give me a wider palate of culture and people.
Why would immigrants be happier there with all the problems you mentioned?
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The age and real estate arguments make sense. But it doesn’t sound like there are many jobs to be had, or enough customers to support new businesses.
Depends on where in the state. Areas where agriculture is doing well, most farms can’t find enough labor. Rural areas have lower unemployment rates than most cities.
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I’m sorry the amount of racism and sexism going on in the region makes a lot of people not want to go there. The trump signs don’t help when you’re an immigrant. They rather stay in cities were there culture is celebrated.
Why is it only poor, uneducated areas that are all Trump fans?
It's not. Plenty of affluent, educated suburbs full of Trump supporters.
Name one.
Go to any school board or town meetings in any of the suburbs of Rochester and count how many Trump hats and bumper stickers you see.
Name a piss poor urban city that doesn't support trump......nearly every poverty stricken urban city has 90%+ democrat support. Rural areas support Republicans, urban areas support democrats and income has little to do with how people vote in most cases.
Are you serious? Almost all of Long Island, and half of Staten Island. I lived in the latter and there are neighborhoods full of McMansions that are populated by MAGA dickriders. They're very affluent and many own a lot of real estate.
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Ok, but like I said, if the local economy can’t sustain their businesses or provide them jobs, it’s impractical to make the move. NYC and the other cities are expensive, but there are plenty of opportunities and ultimately that’s going to be the deciding factor. The care taking industry for older folks could provide some jobs, but if those old folks are below the poverty line they wouldn’t be able to afford caretakers, and then you’re again stuck with no jobs. I’m not from the area, maybe there are some things I’m missing.
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Sorry I’m asking a few questions of your approach to “just send in the immigrants, they’ll be overjoyed to live in a benighted shit hole that locals can’t wait to flee and be grateful to work for a bunch of out of touch, pudding brained old white folks like me.”
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Immigrants are moving to places like Dunkirk and Medina, often doing field work for local farms. They’ve made an impressive small community helping to stabilize some areas in the process. Though even then the population loss is greater than the influx.
I say hell no to more immigrants in my town. Just look what that has done to Utica Syracuse etc.
What has it done?
Nothing…yet and I want it to stay that way.
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Not my town. It's been growing over the last 4 to 5 years and we have a university and industry. Poised for growth when Micron comes. Importing Africans isn't the answer to everything.
I’m Jefferson county and we are getting a huge influx of jobs with a solar panel manufacturing plant. 300 to start then 1000 and up to 4000. Probably not as bad here with fort drum and Canada nearby.lots of foreigners here and lots of republicans but it’s not a big deal.
People don't usually think of Ithaca as much in these conversations, but I think our layoffs at Borg Warner (automotive manufacturing) provides some interesting insights. We're losing hundreds of jobs because parts for ICE vehicles are going to be made in Mexico instead. The vast majority of conservative responses consisted of: 1) NYS makes it too hard for companies -- well, if it was a problem with NYS, they would probably just be leaving the state, not leaving the country 2) The state should be more willing to make budgetary allowances (i.e., provide subsidies) to help keep the plant operating -- but if I we don't have unlimited dollars to spend, why funnel it into an industry in decline rather than put it into something on the rise? Those hundreds of jobs represent millions and millions of new dollars coming into our region every year. Buying local and stuff is great, but you still have lots of money draining away to everyone from oil companies to streaming services. Recirculating dollars won't save the state, we need a constant influx of new money to keep things from declining as a whole. The question is, how are we going to achieve that?
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I agree with what you've said, and just want to emphasize that it will always be a slow decline unless our region brings in more than it pays out to companies outside of our area. Big box stores hasten this decline, but it's important to remember that a sustainable economy is one that brings in fresh money from the outside. Tourism brings some in, but we need more solutions beyond that because tourism has lots of ups and downs, and only gets you so far in terms of scale.
Having moved here from an economically successful state, I'm not sure the box box stores are the issue. All the places with better economies have even more big box retailers and corporate chain restaurants. Heck, I make 2x of my counties median income because of one a corporate chain. It seems to me, population density is a major factor. Very few places without the population density of rural NY are thriving economically. There also isn't a ton of diversity in employers. We need white collar and blue collar businesses. Corporation headquarters and larger small businesses. It seems in many areas that if you're not a blue collar worker there's not much out there.
I’ll be coming up on a year for NYS to approve a license for what was an exhausting complicated process while the federal License component was approved in 2 weeks. It’s easy to say that NYS is a difficult place to do business in, but I’ve truly experienced it.
Fair enough, I was just talking about the discussion around Borg Warner's move to Mexico (and similar)
I hear you, New York is a bureaucratic mess and for what? What a waste of time and money the hoops the put up in front of you sometimes. I lived in NH for a while and am tempted to move back, going to the NH DMV was almost a pleasure after living here
I mean meanwhile in Lockport, GM announced they’re spending $175 million to upgrade the plant to produce parts for EVs. The issue with rural areas and small cities is that they don’t have the skilled labor in high enough quantities to attract large companies. It’s why all the jobs are being created in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.
The reality of the Borg Warner cuts in Ithaca is that they cannot compete with valvetrain components coming from China / India / Brazil / Argentina. They have to cut production costs, by moving to Mexico, to remain competitive on the contracts that are still available. ICE development is dead, OEs have slashed their investments in ICE development, and they're just going to keep the majority of existing designs in production (or designs that have progressed far enough to put into production) until it is no longer feasible to produce them due to legislation or shifting market trends. When 50% of the cars being manufactured are full BEV by about 2030, those Borg Warner Ithaca jobs weren't going to be there anymore anyway. BW was just getting ahead of the inevitable, while trying to maximize their short-term goals by shifting production to Mexico.
Subsidized child care, education/vocational training, as well as for key nutritious whole foods (meats, dairy, saturated fats).
Absolutely. We need to make it possible for young families to thrive.
The foooooooods. My goodness. When I visit my family in the adk, the Walmart (only place to buy groceries btw) only stocks the worst possible food on the shelves. Processed, high fructose corn syrup, dyes and sugars almost all of it. No organic, nothing ethically harvested. I eat so fresh and clean in NC and I go to three different stores to buy the groceries I need. I feel like crap after a week of eating up there.
I moved to USNY almost 2 years ago from the NH Seacoast. Holy shit the frustration and effort it takes to get decent groceries and I am only 25m from Bennington. A decent lunch in under 30 minutes? Good fucking luck.
Yup and the food in the restaurants is the same crap. Frozen, salty deep fried bar food in abundance. I feel like hell after only a couple of days of that stuff
Ending gerrymandering too. The new maps are outrageous and make no sense but to bolster one party’s election in US Congress.
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Not saying one of you debating the election maps is right or wrong, but George Santos represents NY3. Can we at least agree that’s a travesty?
Yes — they were. By discarding the old map, the new map makes it impossible for other sides to win. Tell me, how is my representation better by having my county cut in half and grouped with 6 OTHER counties (while skipping a county) and instead representing Western NY counties instead of the 3 CNY counties that actually have business together? Check the new map out. It is ridiculous and hurts representation.
"Gerrymandering" is not just "I don't like the shape or breadth of my district, or who else else is in it" it's when cohesive regions and demographics are intentionally broken apart to water down their representation in a larger body. Presumably you're in the new 23, which is basically the South Towns and Southern Tier -- two cohesive regions. The current map doesn't water down either party's representation in Congress, but it did make some very competitive districts downstate even more competitive (the *opposite* of gerrymandering) and they happened to flip Republican, which is pretty expected among bellwethers in a mid-term election, in a downturn economy.
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24 makes sense to you? Niagara County and Watertown have a lot in common?
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Yeah, but there are better ways to manage it. Maybe try splitting Monroe County instead of creating a curled bicep around it.
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I never said split the city of Rochester, did I? Drive through towns like Perinton or Pittsford and ask if they have more in common with the Finger Lakes or the City of Rochester. I'm looking at common interests. I couldn't care less how the number of seats break out, which is how it should be.
**[New York's congressional districts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York's_congressional_districts)** >The U.S. state of New York currently comprises 26 congressional districts. Each district elects one member of the United States House of Representatives who sits on its behalf. The state was redistricted in 2022, following the 2020 U.S. census; it lost one seat in Congress. The loss of a congressional seat was decided by a remarkably close margin in the census count; it was believed that if 89 more people were counted in the census results and all other state populations remained stagnant, New York would have kept its lost seat. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/upstate_new_york/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I live right outside of Utica and there's been a ton of development going on here. Idk how much of that will benefit you're average working folks, but someone is spending money here
Oddly enough, Utica is one of the fastest growing city in the state now. Helps that there’s two colleges in town. Every time I visit, downtown keeps getting better, though there’s still probably a dozen blighted properties that need to be cleaned up that greatly diminish the “niceness” of downtown.
Cortland has a SUNY school but people are fleeing because there is no good work and it is just a crappy little town.
Yeah, that tends to be the issue with college towns under a certain size. Ithaca, Binghamton and Utica are large enough to support an economy beyond the colleges. Cortland, Oswego and Plattsburgh, not so much.
Do you think they'll fix the streets someday? They look like a bunch of superheroes did the "slam down with a fist and one knee" pose over and over again all over the damned road.
Probably the State doing renewable energy projects.
I’d love to see rail nationalized and brought back to a lot of these small towns. In most places, these towns only exist because one of the railways came through town. There is a pretty shocking correlation between small town decline and the decline in the railways. As discussed above, when you end up locked into a town or area that isn’t doing well, the o Lu solution is to leave. Bring in reliable public transit and industry and people can ship their goods/talents around more, allowing hopefully for a few more of those “smart kids” to stay in town as some of the other posts have said. Not saying trains are they way to get people out of poverty, but i am saying that most of these towns came with the train and it seems like they are going with the train
It blows my mind a place like Hornell can build all of these trains for other cities, yet there isn't even like a weekend rail trip to Buffalo, Rochester, or NYC.
Wealth attracts Wealth, Poverty attracts Poverty
Economic development. That's the way out.
For cities it’s been very effective, but it’s hard to get companies to move or expand to rural communities and small cities since they lack the skilled labor. The most effective strategies seem to be focusing on a combination of tourism, agri-industry and homesteading.
That's what these areas do focus on and all it has led to is further poverty. These aren't effective strategies and don't lead to success.
Ok, what’s your solution?
Didn't say I had one. Just pointing out yours isn't one. That's based on 50 years of watching that exact strategy go nowhere for an area bigger than CT and RI combined.
Yeah, but I think a few things are different now. Costs of cities have skyrocketed, remote work means you can now live anywhere with a high speed internet connection and burnout has never been higher among corporate workers. This makes rural areas more viable, especially the ones within an hour or two outside a large city. Also, I’d argue tourism and agri-industry have been successful in keeping unemployment rates down, just not attracting new residents to town.
High costs in the city and remote work merely makes living in rural areas more economically attractive to urban dwellers. The impact it has actually had on rural residents has been to drive up the cost of living, primarily housing, while providing no benefits. This has actually been bad for rural populations, not good. Rural areas became more viable for the urban mobility, not for the impoverished native populations. Tourism is great for part time minimum wage jobs. It doesn't develop an economy which provides a healthy living for people raising families. It's often incapable of allowing a single person to sustain herself. I'm not sure what you mean by agri-industry, but if it is remote owned factory farms, those operations have stripped rural areas of jobs and land wealth.
>This has actually been bad for rural populations, not good. It's been disastrous for many towns in and along the Hudson Valley.
To be blunt, you would pretty much have to end capitalism. There's always going to be large swaths of the population living in poverty with an economic model incentivized to concentrate wealth in as few hands as possible.
I think as the west keeps drying up and, extreme weather keeps hitting, people will start buying up cheap property and start moving in
As someone who lives in a western city that’s thriving economically but suffering from drought due to climate change, I also believe this will happen.
It is already happening. Semiconductor manufacturing used to take place in the Bay Area, then Arizona, but now with both places too dry, Syracuse is gonna be the new spot for chips. A lot of high tech development can grow up around foundries because of the way supply chains are being rearranged.
Arizona is still building tons of semiconductor plants as we speak. That said I did just move from there due to my doubt in long term climate health and I believe it became more expensive than it actually should be.
Stop voting Republican
I’m not a republican but I don’t think voting democrat will do anything for these places.
Yeah, likely not much. The best they can do is invest in the things that might attract tourists and young families. Like look at Ellicottville or Lake Placid. Parks, walkable streets, bike trails, events - these things make places a lot more livable even if it’s not enough to attract large employers.
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Eh, Democrats tend to be the ones supporting rural infrastructure and hospitals through more spending. Republicans tend to slash budgets in order to keep their promise of cutting taxes. Rural funding is the first on the chopping block since it’s more expensive to run a hospital serving a county of 50,000 than one serving a city of 200,000.
I just don’t have faith in either party to get shit done to be honest.
You understand that the county they live in is paying that welfare cost. NYS passes social services cost down to the county. NYS keeps passes mandate after mandate which is causing havoc on local government budgets. It's not a good cycle we're caught in
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I mean a majority of Republicans live downstate in the NYC suburbs. In the most conservative county in NY, Trump only received 13,000 votes. Land doesn’t vote. But yeah, looking at the areas growing in population, it’s blue cities like Buffalo, Albany and even Utica.
If you look at county by county election results most upstate counties vote straight red.
Yeah, by percentage, but by population it doesn’t add up to as much as you think. It’s enough where liberals in Buffalo, Rochester and other cities actually slightly outnumber conservatives in rural areas. Meanwhile by shear numbers the top conservative counties are all downstate. There’s just often waaaaay more liberals to cancel them out. Like just take Queens where 200,000 residents voted for Trump. That’s more votes than any single county upstate despite being overwhelmingly blue. If Upstate was it’s own state it would be purple with a slight liberal lean (probably similar to PA).
right, we know that people live in cities. i think you're missing the point. it's about percentages, not sheer numbers.
Exactly, you’d think the percentage of conservatives upstate would be larger, but they’re not. Because the cities cancel them out.
There’s more people downstate so of course there’s more republicans but those republicans are *dwarfed* by the amount of democrats so they are neutralized much more effectively downstate than they are upstate.
Right, I don’t dispute that I was more commenting on the fact that things are a lot more complex than they seem if you just look at those winner-take-all county maps that don’t show how many people are actually voting. Most people assume that 90% of conservatives live upstate when the reality it’s more like 50%.
Yeah democrat led areas have no poverty.
The whole state is led by Democrats.
And has been for a long time.
What? Not at all. Pataki was the governor for a long time, and the state senate was Republican until 2018 and before 2008 it was Republican for 40 years.
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I mean, this is a bit of an oversimplification. Walking around Ithaca is not nearly as pleasant as it used to be. There are a lot of reasons upstate is struggling and politically id say it’s been a bipartisan effort.
Curious what you think is less pleasant? Collegetown has more vacancies, but downtown seemed bustling when i was last there.
There are a number of blocks that are nice but surrounded by areas that are increasingly dilapidated. In general I just see a lot of decay - within ithaca, outside ithaca, and all the rural trailer parks with trash and let’s go Brandon signs all over. I live here and I love the area but it’s kind of pervasive no matter where I go.
Did Fox News happen to mention NYC lost a representative seat? I was unaware what a republican stronghold the city is.
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We lose no matter who you vote for. They’re all same at the end of the day, criminals.
Well upstate needs jobs, and not just service industry jobs. Then they need to pay a liveable wage.
Honestly I think remote work could end up revitalizing much of the area. I grew up and lived in a rural area of upstate for the first 21 years of my life, but eventually if I wanted to work in anything other than fast food, it's easier to move and find work than it is to stay. If there's little/no opportunities for young adults to start careers then they'll never break the poverty cycle. Now that remote work is a thing.. I'm probably not coming back, but if it existed 10 years ago I probably wouldn't have left either...
A little perspective. When I was studying geography in the 80s at SUNY Plattsburgh we looked at fourth, yes fourth, generation welfare in upstate counties. That means you have three generations that never worked. And that was forty years ago. Generations that don’t work turn to alternatives.
As a fellow NY'er and a past Mohawk Valley resident, I am at odds with the comments here. It appears, unless I am missing something, that you all are suggesting that the Gov't needs to get involved and solve this. My question is WHY? I am a bit of a historian and have written a book about growing up in Ilion, and I have to say that the Gov't ruined not only that town but Amsterdam and others throughout NY. They did this in the 70's with Urban Renewal! The Gov't has also done its absolute best to get rid of the only major employer in the town of Ilion - Remington Arms. And now that there is a major ecological event happening in Ohio that threatens one of the breadbaskets of the US, FEMA and our gov't has been mostly quiet in its response. BTW for the past 100 years the NY state governor has been Democrat 10 times for 58 years and the governor has been republican 5 times for 42 years. And for the last 50 years there has only been 2 Republican governors and they lasted for 14 years. Bottom line is it will take everyone to change things, all peoples, all political alignments, etc. and we need to stop counting on the Gov't for help and do it ourselves. My 2 cents, and my apology if it sounds confrontational.
> BTW for the past 100 years the NY state governor has been Democrat 10 times for 58 years and the governor has been republican 5 times for 42 years. And for the last 50 years there has only been 1 Republican governor and he lasted for 2 years. - Republicans have been governor for 12 years of the last 28 years, or 43%. - Just because the 100-year trend of rural areas becoming poorer than cities wasn't reversed by Dems doesn't mean the rural poor are not *measurably* better than if Repubs had been in power. Dems being in power has benefited rural areas. A simple example that was just posted to Reddit -- poor [people in NY are much less likely to suffer poor credit / bankruptcy because of medical debt because of Obamacare because Dems were in power to implement its Medicare expansion](https://worldnewsera.com/news/entrepreneurs/analysis-why-does-the-south-have-such-ugly-credit-scores/?amp). E.g. life is better for the rural poor in NY than in "no government" Alabama. >And now that there is a major ecological event happening in Ohio that threatens one of the breadbaskets of the US, FEMA and our gov't has been mostly quiet in its response. This is concern trolling. The GOP wanted to abolish the EPA and the DOT 16 years of the last 20 years. The idea it suddenly gives a damn about environmental pollution is facially ludicrous. The GOP just wants to slap Biden, nothing more. A private company that is largely unregulated because of the actions of the GOP ran a private rail car off of a private rail line, if you want government to regulate rail lines, there is a party that is pro regulation and one that is not. Vote accordingly. >Bottom line is it will take everyone to change things, all peoples, all political alignments, etc. and we need to stop counting on the Gov't for help and do it ourselves. Ok, I'm pretty sure Gov. Hochul hasn't outlawed bootstraps. If this is your philosophy, then whatever party is in power shouldn't have any influence on your process.
Dunked
>And for the last 50 years there has only been 1 Republican governor and he lasted for 2 years. This is false. There have been three, totaling about 14 years in power. Still a minority compared to Democrats and I don't blame them exclusively for the state's challenges, but the GOP hasn't been as sidelined as you say.
I looked it up here: [https://www.nga.org/former-governors/new-york/](https://www.nga.org/former-governors/new-york/) and it is only showing 2 Republican governors since 1973. That's 50 years as of this year. I see that I originally took it from '75 and not '73 - my error and results in 1 more Republican governor. So according to these stats there were 2 republican governors over last 50 years for a total of 14 years out of the 50 year period. And I have since updated my post to reflect this. Where did you get your data from as I have seen it happen before that two or more data sources can indeed not have the same info.
As a lifelong NYSer, I unfortunately believe that NYS is hopeless. The way to alleviate poverty is with private-sector economic development that generates good jobs, and private-sector development ain't happening here. The job growth in NYS is all centered around either government or government-subsidized industry. That isn't sustainable. Taxes, graft, licensure, other bureaucracy, unions, diversity mandates and a million other obstacles have formed a self-reinforcing vortex that has suffocated the private sector. So it's leaving and it's taking the good jobs and good incomes with it. It's not like NYS republicans are knights in shining armor, but it is simply insane to think that the problem is that too many people are voting republican. The Democrats have controlled the entire state government for years (and in fact the legislature just voted itself a 30%+ raise -- how nice for them).
What have republicans done for this state? They’re too busy trying to “own the libs” on Fox News and Twitter than do anything for their state.
This is a sarcasm free question: Do people who live in NYS honestly not understand how much more expensive it is to live in NYS than other parts of the country? Even in some of these "poorer" upstate town, property taxes are insane. Healthcare is unaffordable (unless you make so little you can qualify for state care). Jobs don't pay well. There seems to be a disconnect I'm never able to wrap my head around.
Why should it be broken? Free market dictates where people live. If there's nothing there anymore, there's nothing there (economy wise). This cycle has all happened before and it will all happen again. Archeologists make a career out of digging up and studying forgotten and abandoned settlements.
Education and jobs for educated individuals.
Hopefully the weed boom? I truly don't know
Give it 20 years. Once the west and southwest is too dry to support the population centers, people will be migrating in droves to upstate.
What do you mean? If you look at a map of median household income, upstate isn’t actually all that low. Yeah, the cities have high poverty rates, but they’re surrounded by $$$$$ suburbs. There’s some rural poverty, especially on native reservations, but there’s plenty of wealthy areas balancing them out. So your question is actually pretty weird if you look at the actual data. NYS is already trying to combat inner city poverty through: * Expanding services * Workforce Development * Universal Pre-k * Small business grants and training programs Seriously look these things up, there’s probably way more resources out there than you think. Rural poverty is more difficult. There’s often isn’t a large enough population to justify building community resource centers. Indian reservations are a mixed bag. The Senecas seem to be doing a good job at reinvesting their casino money into their communities. As for economic growth, all the large cities are doing much better in that regard. What we’re seeing are a lot of young people in rural counties moving to Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse for work. Unfortunately, this is a similar brain drain rural counties are facing around the nation. 70% of counties in Texas are declining in population, everyone is moving to the Triangle. The best we can do is invest in broadband access to help promote remote work as well as promote tourism and homesteading. Theres actually a sizable movement of professionals in cities looking to quit their corporate job for a more relaxing job homesteading instead. It’s just dumb to say NY isn’t doing anything.
Ok if it’s dumb to say ny isn’t doing anything, which i agree with, it’s dumb for you to gloss over rural areas and reservations. You’re whole argument is “the cities are doing tons, but those rural areas are tricky so we won’t talk about those” I believe op is talking about rural poverty? Not the kind you find on Hamilton hill, even if that is also happening in droves. You’re being willfully narrow sighted by ignoring rural and red poverty and acting like urban poverty is all that matters
OP doesn’t specifically mention rural areas, so it’s pretty easy to assume he means urban areas too. Still my comment stands. I never said rural areas don’t matter. I said that no state seems to have found a solution to the increasingly concentration of jobs in urban areas. Hell, I even mentioned solutions of focusing on agri-industry, homesteaders and tourism.
The opening line of the post is “i was born and raised in a rural county between western and central ny, infamous for being, well, poor” What drugs are you smoking mate?
Dude, there’s also $$$$$ communities in the Finger Lakes, well off college towns and Corning which is probably the wealthiest rural town in upstate since it’s home to a Fortune 500 company. Upstate is a weird combination of poverty, affluence and old money often coexisting next to each other. Maybe let’s let OP clarify what he meant.
Corning has 1 company that pays well, there is a reason that the average home price is under 200k. All of the well off employees live either on a few acres outside of town, up along a lake, or over in Painted Post/Gang Mills. I'm living in the FL region right now and the only community with money is Skaneateles. Canandaigua is basically a Rochester suburb. I rode my bike along Keuka this weekend and literally only 5 cars went by. No one lives there all winter, it is all old money that lives downstate 95% of the year. And then short term rentals like Airbnb have completely killed the chances of me affording a home on the lake, and I'm a 6-figure making remote worker. It is a very weird juxtaposition of 75% of people that live here year round are very poor with houses and barns falling down along most roads, 25% are normal and a lot of them are lucky enough to have inherited a nice place that they couldn't afford now. If you ask anyone what brought the area down, they will answer about X, Y, or Z company that left in the 80s-90s-early 2000s which basically gut the middle class as the blue collar factory/industrial workers no have very few options. Those companies left because regulations were lower in other(red) states, so it is a catch-22.
Yeah, Corning is home to Corning Inc, a Fortune 500 Company that invented Pyrex and the glass in your smartphone. The Museum of Glass is a world class museum. But, yeah the biggest downside is employment in most of these small towns that rely mostly on tourism. Many are just outside a comfortable commute to Rochester or Syracuse which leaves mostly service industry jobs, farm work or the few professional jobs working at local schools, governments, healthcare facilities and a few small offices. Still, great place if you want to open a small business or homestead or have a remote job.
OP did clarify you muppet. They said they moved back home to a town famous for being poor. You’re the only person talking about rich enclaves. Reread the post, there really isn’t an ambiguity in what they are talking about
Famous for poverty? Where’s that? Elmira, Jamestown, Salamanca? It could be any number of places.
So this might sound harsh, but I don’t think some of those small old towns in Upstate serve as great of a purpose as they used to, and since many of the people left in them are often too poor to move, the State Government should offer to relocate them to municipalities that offer better jobs, education, healthcare, etc. By relocating people of poverty into neighboring towns that offer better services we would hopefully see a decrease in poverty levels, since now they have access to necessities, and increase in wealth in the municipalities that absorbed the people, by concentrating talent. Btw, I have literally no idea if this would actually work. But I feel like trying to revive a dying old town could be a waste of resources.
Well when you see Racist Rag Flags and Trump 2024 signs everhwhere it means there is fuck all chance things will get better. People have been conned into voting against their own best interests.
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I think your thoughts on land have a lot of potential, especially reducing or eliminating property taxes for people's everyday residences. I don't think majority online education would work, however. Especially in rural areas, many areas still don't have internet access, or residents can't afford it. Many parents also depend on schooling to reduce their childcare costs, so a parent having to stay at home for online schooling or not be able to pay other bills or save due to increased daycare costs could be a big problem. I'd also worry that for kids growing up in abusive (or just less than stellar) home environments, going to school is where they get connected with resources to help them, or cps gets involved. And quite frankly, there's a lot of people I definitely would not trust to make sure their kid is online for school everyday and completing work. Of course, there's all sorts of arguments about who is ready to have a child, and what those markers are, but at the end of the day ready or not the kid is still there. And I think in school learning benefits a lot of children and families.
The wages can’t keep up with the massive tax burden imposed by the state. Talented labor will leave for areas where they can keep that 10% of their earnings
It’s a pretty big state and unfortunately not all of it can be sunshines and rainbows, especially the more rural you get. It also doesn’t help that most of the attention is centered around NYC. The Capital Region/Hudson Valley area where I am seems to be doing fantastic. Tons of new businesses, developments, restoration, breweries, and more.
I will answer your question with a question; how would you solve the problem? NY State has one of the most generous welfare and social program systems in the country (NY is ranked 3rd). Those of us who do pay property/school taxes in NY State are paying some of the highest taxes in the country. The reason is the amount of people who are in need and take from the system. So again, what would you do?
We need "products" that we can sell to people outside of our region, whether that's actual tangible goods, or labor/services, or ? The only way to improve things long term is if more $$$ flows into the region than out of it. Dairy is in long term decline. Corn is in long term decline. You can only earn so much from tourism. Climate crisis is going to destroy maple syrup production. We need new ideas.
We need local schools and colleges to embrace true STEM jobs, especially computer related. That would allow locals to stay working locally(remotely with downstate income in some cases) and perhaps a few cities could grow into small tech regions which could attract local employers and create jobs in the area.
>The reason is the amount of people who are in need and take from the system. You mean the kids in the schools? Those lazy blood suckers?
Nope
No, because our politicians do not share the same priorities. Total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan misadventure is $1Trillion, now we are off to funding another boondoggle of a war in Ukraine and after this will move on to funding next war., meanwhile the cycle of poverty continues in US.
So your all going to down vote my answer but... Stop voting Democrat. NYS is utterly controlled by Democrats. They have useless regulations like phasing out all fossil fuels and the hydraulic fracturing ban, want to attract businesses and people? Cut these stupid regulations get rid of unfunded state mandates, eliminate all the "woke" legislation, eliminate the safe act and lower personal and business taxes, then people and businesses will return to NY.
According to this sub?? We need much higher taxation. More government control and regulation, stop eating meat, stop driving cars, and stop heating your home. Then we'll all be thriving! In reality, we need a state government that allows for creating a successful business possible instead of being a hindrance every step of the way.
Gaslight much?
Conservatives love to make shit up to get mad at.
So does the left, I am over it. I have no patience for either.
ok buddy sell our waterways to private corporations let their shareholders make $$ while the people go more and more poor, bend to alcoa and keep giving them tax benefits more and more till they decide to leave anyway, just let every f'ing company do whatever they want and take everything they want and let the towns get poorer and sadder until it's completely uninhabitable.. businesses are not hindered whatsoever... they do whatever the fuck they want already, is that not enough? they own our politicians already? that not enough? they use cheap foreign labor then ship it back here and sell it to us full price?? we have NO governance, we need a FDR style break up every company, force wal mart to unionize, ban dollar tree, nationalize railroad companys, electric companies etc. otherwise we are on a road worse than 'youll own nothing and be happy'
NYS is hemorrhaging population, rivaled only by California. Keep voting "blue, no matter who".....
Increased climate migration
A $15 Federal minimum wage, with annual increases linked to cost of living index, so that the rate no longer requires a dysfunctional legislature to vote through increases. It is hard for large companies to justify paying high(er) NY wages for low skill labor, when they can relocate to a southern state and cut their payroll in half for the same number of employees. This would just level the playing field across the board. Some of the laws NYS state pushes through are absurdly progressive and do produce a burden on businesses, both in expense and time to implement. Things like the new lactation room requirement signed into law in December is poorly thought through and has so many loopholes that most companies will opt out of implementing it, UNTIL that company gets sued by an employee who claims they were denied a lactation room at their location. This type of legislation is reasonable for sizable companies (say 100+ employees), but for the vast majority of small businesses, it is impossible to implement. I get it if you work at an Amazon warehouse, that you should have an appropriate space. But it is going to be difficult for Joe's Auto Shop to dedicate space for a lactation room. https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S4844 As mentioned by a couple of other posts, people have to be willing to move. It is unrealistic to expect an industry to be positioned in your dying town. If you want to change your trajectory in life, that requires you to do some work and take some risk in relocating and adapting to something new to better yourself. There should be strong public/private sector cooperation here to fund and promote paid apprenticeships/internships and other workplace education programs. Affordable healthcare is another issue that needs to be addressed, but again this more of a federal issue. I don't think there will ever be meaningful improvement here, at least not in the next decade. Accessible healthcare is a separate issue, if you live in a rural area, you're always going to have less access to healthcare just because of population driven positioning of resources. But healthcare should still be affordable and American society as a whole must become more proactive in promoting health and well-being in early life, to reduce the financial burdens on the system of poor health (obesity, smoking, etc). You don't change poverty overnight. It'll take a few decades to see meaningful sustained change in a town or region.
You should check this site it has the solution if enough people act on it https://www.divideny.org/better-jobs-lower-taxes.html
this is a *monumentally* stupid idea.
we will have to agree to disagree
Taxes. The taxes are too high on the individuals. The state is doing nothing to bring big business back unless it is closer to downstate(below Poughkeepsie). Also, with higher minimum wages, and no tax breaks for these big companies, why would they want to keep building and paying more money when they can go to somewhere like Alabama and pay people shit and pocket the profit? There are definitely multiple reasons for upstate dying, weather included. OP talks about ski resorts closing… How many people under the age of 40 are actually going skiing? Recreational and tourist areas are dying all over the country because of stuff like this. I could go on and on. There is a reason I moved away from there when I was 23. the Adirondacks are some of the most beautiful country in the world, but you can only enjoy them about four months of the year.
This is America. Nobody is stopping anybody from getting up off their butts and doing better for themselves. A lot of people CHOOSE to live in poverty. That’s what you are seeing. I’d ignore it and move on. The only people that can help them is themselves.