[Music] Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

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Hello again everybody, I'm Ray Gildow, host of Lakeland Currents.

Welcome to a discussion today about rural living in the middle of everywhere.

It's a concept that's new to me and I'm not sure what it means yet, but our guests are going to explain that in great detail.

My guest to the end of the table is Dee Dee LeMier and Dee Dee is from Blackduck, Minnesota, which is one of my favorite little towns.

I've been there many, many times, and you're with the University of Minnesota Extension.

And Ben Winchester has been on this show more than I have.

It's been my pleasure.

Six or seven times, Ben, that you've been here?

And you're a sociologist and you study trends that happen not only in Minnesota but you study them in many, many areas, so it's a great honor to have you guys on board.

And let's see what you're talking about here when you say that you're in the middle of everywhere.

What does that mean?

I think you know we do a lot of work around the rural narrative and the idea here is that the narrative we're using to describe our small towns and rural places can be terrible.

It's that our best days are behind us, nobody wants to live here, you know the lucky few escape, and get out somehow.

When we do find that there is a regular movement of people, newcomers to our small towns since the 70's, that people in their 30's 40's and 50's.

And we call this The Brain Gain.

And, you know, we kind of arrived at this point that we on one hand have a totally negative narrative about rural in many cases, but on the other hand, I can't find a home to buy.

Like how do you have this like rural is totally desirable here.

So how do we arrive at this point and so I think we've got communities that look different than they used to and they do.

We have shells of towns, of remnants of, you know, grocery stores and bank buildings and we think when we drive through town that our best days are behind us and that brick and mortar can be confusing when we see brick and mortar and these businesses closed up.

We drive past them every day and it is easy to think that our best days are behind us, but in fact what we have found is that our towns are full, our economy looks different.

We're much more regional and so we kind of play off of the notion that we live in the middle of nowhere and really we don't.

We live in the middle of everywhere.

We put our home in one place, you have your job in another.

There's been a complete decoupling of where people work and live.

So historically I think in the past people would move to where the jobs were, right?

If this were 1920 you would see job opportunities in Chicago you're going to move there, but today it's much different, you know, Covid really accelerated the fact that you can live wherever you want.

You can have jobs that can be done remotely, you can remote work.

You might not even need to be in the office but one day a week, so where you put your residence has become decoupled from where you work.

So we do end up in this environment now where you may live in one place and work in another.

And we see that in Brainerd here.

Every day about 8,500 people commute into town and every day about 4,000 people commute out.

Just 30% of people, of workers, that live in Brainerd actually live here and work here.

So we've got a number of people that commute in and out and even if you go out to the county level, if you're looking at Crow Wing County, you've got 10,000 people that commute in every day, 10,000 people that commute out every day.

So we live in this web of activity that looks vastly different than rural America in 1920 when we would live and work and shop and play in one town, have a fairly small capture area around our places.

We're much more bigger and much more regional now.

So how do you do economic development, how do you talk about the future of your community when it's not just an old economic development model of let's bring in the business and when the business is here that's when we're going to get people to move here, because that's the only reason why people would move here is if they have a job here.

That is one way of thinking about economic development.

There's also a way and that's the industrial recruitment model.

To be honest there's a term for that, industrial recruitment.

We do know, Steve Deller talks about the four waves of economic development.

Industrial recruitment is one, when we're working with small businesses is another, working on clusters is yet another, and then really our focus today is really around resident recruitment, around place making too.

And that is you need places that people want to live, because what we had found in our newcomer survey is people don't just choose your town for a job, they want a slower pace of life, they want safety and security, they want a low cost of housing.

And then, of course, they have to find a job, but that's not why they select the town that they end up in.

So I think a lot of times the narratives in our communities can be competing with one another.

You have a narrative of the past on one side, that our best days are behind us, and meanwhile the people moving in today are like I love this place despite this narrative, I love where you are and I love where you're going.

So I think we in Extension, we're really lucky to have jobs that help work with our small towns and our rural communities and these kind of all these different adaptive strategies to the world that we live in.

So, in many ways, we do want to reframe the conversation, we don't live in the middle of nowhere, you live in the middle of everywhere, and when you start to delineate all these boundaries you find out that your community is my community.

You spend time in my community, I spend time in your community and we interact with one another at all times, and so this becomes this web of activity that we just love to look at as community developers, economic developers in our communities.

Yes.

So Dee Dee what do you do, what do you specialize in?

So I have been involved with both community economics conversations and also with tourism development conversations and these days I live in Park Rapids, so I'm in this kind of like Northern Lakes Area and I actually office in Brainerd so I spend a lot of time in communities that are, you know, living at that intersection of both serving local residents but also very, very aware that their economic drivers include bringing in visitors, and you know that is like a core component of the economic work in our region.

And I think Ben's work has really done a lot to help sort of push back against that narrative that he talked about.

But then it also has kind of created this space that to say okay if we're in the middle of everywhere, how do we know that, how do we understand that, what do we do with that, and unfortunately a lot of the data sources that we have in economics, you know, are tied to the census and things that they're, you know, it may be a 10 year window before we get some sources of data replenished.

Some of the census data, you know we'll get some updates and things, but we're in this like very kind of slow-moving data world and a couple of years ago a new tool came across our desk around kind of tapping into some of the new forms of technology that make rural living very different.

I mean right now, like here, I could pick up my phone, book a flight and I could be on a beach in a couple of hours even though we're in, you know, a pretty rural area.

That's a very new experience for rural living but that same technology allows us as researchers to actually kind of get some sight lines and to understand some of that connectivity that Ben was talking about in a way where we can actually create some maps of that and we can actually show that.

And so in my work with communities, I've been able to kind of lean into this space that Ben's created and to explore how we can tap into some new modern tools that give us much faster turnaround on that data, but also kind of open up some of those conversations and that's been a lot of fun.

I worked with a community in southern Minnesota, actually.

I know you're a fisherman.

And when I first met with them they said everybody goes to the next town over to do fun things.

I don't know.

And you could just tell that their confidence was a little off and I had a lot of conversations with them.

I brought in first impression visitors to come to their community and experience it.

We did community surveys.

I mean all of these, you know, really rich ways of connecting with them.

But it turned out that being able to show a map of actually the folks from that community come to your town because you have a lake and I could use this technology to look at those boat landings and to say where else are they going to, how are these things connected?

Now I promise I did not give away anybody's hot fishing spot, I know the rules, there are boundaries to what I would share with anybody including my own fishing holes.

But just being able to kind of zero in and say hey this is a space that we know people visit, what can we understand about it, led to very different conversations in the community.

It allowed our team to facilitate a different conversation and it's exciting to think about, you know, what seeds are we planting for communities to be able to see themselves a little bit differently and to see some of those assets, you know, that may not feel that special day to day, but to where they can see like oh that's actually a strength okay now what do we do with that?

So it's been an exciting combination of things to be able to build on what Ben has been doing and to be just sort of exploring how do we ask other questions or find tools that help address that gap.When you were sharing the data of the number of people coming in and out of Brainerd, I had no idea it was that significant.

Right.

We, my wife and I, spend a little time in Florida in the winter time and I swear that Fort Meyers area is where the Twins play.Yes.

It is as busy here on the 4th of July weekend as it is down there.

Right.

I don't know where all these people are coming from, obviously lots of them are going to the lakes.

I remember when the paper mill closed in Brainerd.

There were about 800 employees and I thought boy that's going to be the end of Brainerd.

It didn't even seem to make a difference.

Yes, there are bumps all the time through our history of the economy and you know especially when we talk about the world that we're living in.

Globalization impacts all of us.

This is impacting every single one of our towns.

So when you lose your grocery store, you close your hardware store, it's not your fault.

This is the world that we're in.

If you're in a more metro area like you might have three or four other grocery stores to drive to.

You don't see the one in Hancock that closed and now you drive past that every day again and remind yourself that your town is dying.

So we do have these kind of artifacts that we look at about commuting but it's interesting for me to look at what our jurisdictions mean and when I say jurisdictions I mean like our cities and our counties.

And we try to do boundary planning, right?

We want to have a strategic plan for the county or a strategic plan for the city.

Well, who do we tend to include in that?

Well, we include the people that live here.

What about the people that commute in, those 10,000 people that commute in to Brainerd every single day.

They call this place home, too.

What about all the visitors that call this place home for a number of months even though we end up with a competing narrative here too because it might be oh those lake people they're only here on the weekend.

But at the same time, we know, we've done research, Extension shows 51% of these lake people, the seasonal homeowners, plan to move to their second home as a primary residence when they retire, and they're going to become full-time residents at this point and spending all this disposable income, all these retirement dollars, which we know makes up a quarter of all income in our rural communities is through these transfer receipts.

So then we hear from the second homeowners like I'm never invited to anything, like these are the competing narratives that we try to bridge.

We try to bridge these conversations amongst communities because there is no just singular community in your town.

You've got multiple communities that exist.

So when we recognize that, you know, what's cool for Ray is cool for Ray and what's cool for Ben is cool for Ben, then we want to build our strategies around lifting up the voices of each other and not just saying like my way is the only way to do it or you need to learn how we do it around here.

We've got a consistent pattern of change coming across this country.

So my point is when we do have globalization impacting everywhere, the key differential is how you respond to this and that is social capital.

How well does your community work together and if your community works together you're able to overcome these struggles that you have when you close 600 jobs out and how does that look when it comes back, when you've got organizations right next door here like BLAEDC that work hard to do this type of work to ensure that when you have these economic shocks that they're going to be minimized in our level.

But just for some context setting we're in Minnesota, we have high levels of social capital, high levels of voter turnout, we tend to respond more positively to many of these economic shocks that other states may struggle with across this country.

You know the coronavirus changed so many things and I know so many people are working remotely, do you see that pattern holding where the people that are working remotely are going to get tired of that?

And the reason I asked this is I've done some little research on the side, it seems like depression is a bigger issue for people who are isolated from jobs and who are working from home.

Are you looking at that at all, have you seen any trends here?

We are not looking at that specifically.

This kind of socio-psychological aspect of the shift of how we do our work is definitely playing itself out and I think these are those unintended consequences that you don't tend to think about what happens when you have that social isolation and especially as it relates to work.

I think we've got tools to try to have chat open or you know we have different things where in real life you may not have those opportunities, you may have some avenues into people's personal lives.

So in many ways I think the pandemic did shine a light on the life/work balance and I don't even say work/life because many people are putting their life first and I would say appropriately.

So it's this life/work balance we're trying to achieve.

So how do you accommodate that in your business, how do you accommodate that in your community to ensure that you can have a resident recruitment strategy not just a job, we just need to fill these jobs.

You want full-time residents, you want people who are going to be here long term and they're here longterm when they feel welcomed.

They're here longterm when they feel that they're respected and that they're seen.

So these are the ways forward for us, it is welcoming strategies, it's how do you recruit these new residents in to let them know they will be a valued part of this community.

Welcome Wagon.

Welcome Wagon.

We used to have those, we used to have those, but you know the post office can't just hand out a list of all the people and here's their phone numbers, you know, I mean we do have some privacy concerns in this country.

You right.

But go ahead were you going to say something Dee Dee?

Oh, I was just going to say that to me that's part of really the fun of the work that we're doing.

So I've been involved with a couple of projects with the Brainerd YMCA, where we've actually like used some of the tools that I mentioned, and you know when we're talking about community economics and community development we are not just beholden to like bringing in businesses, we're able to look at this kind of holistic picture of what does it mean to be a healthy, vibrant community all together.

So we end up having conversations with schools, with nonprofits, with different industry partners, but we're not required to stay, you know, kind of in an island with that.

And it was personally it was really fun to do some work with the YMCA here because that was at the very beginning of when we were trying to figure out this tool.

But to see, you know, as much as Ben's work has highlighted where some of the stories we tell ourselves and each other about our towns may be wrong, it actually highlighted that some of those things you know may actually be right, and so in this case to say like the YMCA is part of the community and to look at this data and like yes the YMCA is part of the community that people go to the Y and then they go to the post office.

They go to the Y and then they go to work.

They go to the Y and then they go to school.

And the work that we're able to do, that's not just focused on, you know, work, you know, whether that's in a home office or with industry.

I think that actually supports addressing the kinds of concern that you raise around like what is that well-being piece?

Because I think that that is a perennial question that we have as communities, whether it is tied to our place of employment or if it's tied to that kind of full life cycle kind of well-being.

Because I suspect, you know, when we retire that question of, you know, where do we have that social connection, where do we, you know, feel balanced and good and connected and everything.

I suspect that isn't going to go away.

What is it specifically you're looking at with the Y?

So the initial work that we were involved with was around an economic impact analysis for some of the renovations things and as you probably well know that they've been able to move forward on some of those plans.

They have purchased some different properties and are working on some different development plans which is, you know, really exciting to be able to be a part of.

And then we have another project that we've been continuing to explore with them as part of that ongoing connection.

But really, like, we're behind the scenes and just helping to make sure that the data that we have access to, you know, is available for the community's consideration and those conversations so that those decisions around community development are coming from a place where they're informed by data, that it's sort of validated, you know, outside of, you know, the different players and that's what a lot of our work does is really kind of supporting more behind the scenes.

Believe it or not, you know, economists aren't necessarily the front.

They don't put us front and center, which is just fine, but we do a lot to like try and support a variety of projects across the state where people are considering those questions.

I live in Staples, and we have a lot of new developments, two new clinics, a new addition going on the hospital for oncology, and all of these new apartments they're all full, and I have not, you know, before now really been that familiar with the concept of living in the middle of everywhere but it really does tie into what I'm seeing in my community, where there's people coming from all over.

They don't necessarily work in Staples, they work somewhere else.

Most of them honestly I've never seen before and I've lived there for 40 some years.

Yeah, right.

Do you find that the new the leadership in the communities that you're working with are open to this new strategy and this new concept of living in the middle of everywhere because it's a different model.

I think typically, you know the industrial recruitment model of economic development trumps almost every idea out there.

People think we need to bring in the employer.

Again, that's the only reason people are going to move here, but really over the past 15 years now we've had this labor shortage already, which I would argue is a housing shortage, we are not short of labor.

But essentially what we've watched is our rural communities especially fill up in the '70's, '80's and '90's.

And then the baby boomers moved in, especially, their kids left, which caused your population to go down but then these, especially the baby boom generation, stayed and then they retired over the past 15 years and what happened when they retired, they stayed in their home.

If you're a local employer, and I just lost three of my employees, I've got nowhere for my substitute labor to live.

Like I just watch Ray retire, I can't even replace Ray's position because he didn't move out of his house.

This is our biggest constraint right now is around housing.

So again this flies in the face of the rural narrative that we're all dying.

We're highly desirable and in fact these regional centers especially, like not Hancock, not 700 people, right, but Staples when you're getting into the thousands now you're starting to see our regional centers pick up and to be these medical hotspots especially because these are the places that as people approach their continuum of care, they're in their continuum of life, they want independent living.

You want to still be able to go places.

You also want to be able to pick up and leave for two weeks or a month to go visit grandkids without maintenance.

So are there opportunities for us to move this entire population over?

Because ultimately when you move this population over we're moving them out of their workforce home and so essentially we've got lots of workforce housing that's currently occupied by the wrong people.

And Kelly Asche, with the Center for Rural Policy and Development, has done all this types of research, but we know that this generation, especially in our rural communities is older, and we've been talking about the drain of rural for almost 20 years now.

Well the drain of rural is now turning into the dying of rural and when the dying happens it actually physically, like legitimately, opens up a home when a person passes away.

So I'm brutally honest as a demographer that death is leading to rebirth right now, and in the most rural counties in Minnesota, two years into the pandemic, the counties that had the highest death rates also had the highest in migration rates.

Really.

They did.

So we're starting to turn and imagine what happens if 3/4 of your homes in your small town are going to turn over and it's out with old and in with three to five person households.

Out with one and two person households.

Half of these newcomer households, we've done research on, have kids.

We expect to see population growth.

We expect to see school enrollments rebound because these homes are going to turn over.

Three quarters of your homes.

And you're talking rural Minnesota.

Rural more specifically.

Yep not necessarily Willmar or Bemidji, which are larger and have other dynamics around colleges, too.

So there's all these kind of different wicked problems that appear in individual regional centers.

But in our most real rural places this is the pattern that we're seeing.

They're getting over this hump, housing is turning over and the moment a home is put on the market it is sold, and we honestly tell people that you want to find a home to buy in our rural communities go visit with your seniors after church, it is your number one audience.

I mean otherwise homes don't even hit the market.

We found out 40 to 60% of home sales during the pandemic never hit the market.

Wow.

So it was like, hey Ray, I know your mom is looking to sell her home, like we've always loved her home we're going to take you out for lunch and we're just going to make this happen.

This was 40 to 60% of some of these home sales during the pandemic.

You're a devious guy.

When you want a home you've got to do what you can to find a home.

This is interesting.

Yeah, that really is interesting.

So if we follow this trend, we're going to see more diversity in all of our communities aren't we?

That's right.

We already are in most of our communities if you haven't seen it.

Like we've had diversity in the past and even collectively rural tends to get a bad rap about not being diverse, but nationally we've got more diversity than some of these urbanized areas because you've got African-Americans in the South you've got Hispanics in Southwest.

Like rural is not the singular construct here.

So even so, like here in Minnesota, we are slow to the diversity game, we are well behind on the bell curve compared to other states, but it is coming and we've been through these changes before, we've been through the changes when the you know Protestants moved in.

We were through these changes when the Germans moved into town, and, you know, we've been through changes in our past but it's been a while and we may have forgotten what it's like to welcome new people in, but the people that move in today are visually different than us and it makes for other wicked problems that appear in our communities around how welcoming are we, what do we feed off of when we're interpreting what people are saying, or how we're visualizing them.

So there's a lot of work to be done as our communities change.

But this is not a new problem, this is another problem for us to capitalize on as we change.

So when you work with leadership in communities what is it that you focus on now?

Expanding the conversation.

Just I mean we're educators.

We're educators and to show that there's more than one way to do economic development or community development.

It's not just one way.

So some people say like we tried that before.

Like yeah, you tried it 25 years ago.

Like maybe there's a reason it didn't work that we could be working out today.

But it really is expanding the conversation about what's possible and we work with the army of the willing, right?

We're trying to get people on board with any types of strategies and we're going to support them, we're going to support them with the education, research, and outreach programming that we can because we love our job.

This is our job is to extend this knowledge out of the University.

We're lucky to have this kind of position across the state.

So if any of your listeners here are interested in learning more about Extension we are here for you and we're happy to do this type of job.

And how do they reach you while I'm on that thought?

Definitely visit our website extension.umn.edu and click on Community Development.

We are in the Department of Community Development and we do economic development, community development, leadership, civic engagement and tourism programming.

And this is it's just amazing to me.

The first time I had you on this show we were talking about the The Brain Drain right?

Right.

Right, everybody's moving out.

We're so far away from that conversation now aren't we?

Just it's amazing and that's maybe like six, seven years ago.

Yeah at least.

It's been a number of years since we started to capitalize upon The Brain Gain to make it more well known and even since then we've had a number of organizations across the state rise up to work work on resident recruitment efforts.

So it's been very rewarding to work in an industry, in the rural development industry in Minnesota, with all these great groups around the RDC's and initiative foundations.

We are rich with resources from our rural community.

So, again, if we've got young people that are interested in joining the industry, we've got room for you, too.

Wow.

So we're down to the last minute here, but if somebody wants to contact you what are some of the topics that you would present?

Yes.

So, as Ben mentioned, we cover a number of different areas.

So I specifically do work around sort of that intersection of tourism and community development and would certainly welcome conversations.

It doesn't matter what community it is.

It doesn't have to be on a lake, right?

No it does not have to be on a lake by any means, and I think, you know, a lot of my interest is really finding those ways that we can invite people in, whether it's residents and invite them to engage in their community in new ways, or to invite visitors to our communities.

We're out of time, but you guys are always doing such interesting and exciting research and you're always ahead of the curve.

I think you are anyway.

That's really, really interesting.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to jump on with me and talk about these new things.

Thank you for providing the rural voice.

Thank you, Ray.

You've been watching Lakeland Currents.

I'm Ray Gildow.

So long until next time.