Pushed Out

The popular interpretation of the western economy is that of a seemingly natural boom-and-bust cycle. That story of inevitable failure curiously contradicts the equally popular progressive narrative of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, in which American ideals of independence, self-reliance, freedom, and opportunity attracted newcomers to the region. In Pushed Out, sociologist Ryanne Pilgeram both complicates and reconciles those narratives, recognizing that since the mid-nineteenth century and the dispossession of Native lands, corporations often developed the physical and economic infrastructure for settler towns, profiting even after the nation no longer depended on the rural West for its natural resources—lumber, copper, coal, crops—to fuel industrial America.Pilgeram argues that the history of the rural West continues to guide future development decisions, as locals have, over time, come to accept the power of outside investors who cater to “amenity migration.” Nonextractive amenities cater to and attract outsiders—whether tourists, retirees, or the creative classes—to rural western places, effectively destroying the systems that provide locals with a historic sense of place. Such “gentrification” undermines the authenticity that comes from retaining or rehabilitating tangible remnants of past development and social relationships. Pilgeram historicizes the rural gentrification phenomenon as part of the boom-and-bust cycle common throughout the American West and its history, but she believes that it is a pattern that communities can break.She does this by applying sociological theory to historical patterns to understand recent commercial development in the rural West. Pilgeram develops a single case study of one Idaho town, with a local, community history perspective and archival research. Much as the timber barons extracted the region's forest and other natural resources, Pilgeram extracts a lot from her case study (and hometown) in Dover, Idaho, and specifically the battle over the controversial Mill Lake development. She has applied David Harvey's theory of the “spatial fix” to understand rural gentrification through the fickle nature of a capitalist system triggering a Marxian class struggle over places tied to local resources to explain the boom-and-bust cycle, periodically reinventing places through economic and social systems as much as actual building, to make it once again profitable.Pilgeram relegates Dover's history primarily to the first chapter, titled “A Brief History of the Last 62 Million Years,” which covers the displacement of the Kalispel people and the arrival of Europeans, until we quickly get to the establishment of Dover by the timber barons from the mid-nineteenth century through the prosperous period just after World War II, when the mill sustained its workers, who in turn built their own communities. Pilgeram emphasizes how swiftly lands passed from the government to the railroad to the barons, creating places owned by people who did not live in them and setting up unsustainable social and economic systems. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the economic downturn in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the decaying infrastructure, not unlike in a peripheral urban neighborhood. Those in power allowed “demolition by neglect,” to borrow the preservationist's phrase, in order to rebuild the physical, economic, and social infrastructure to benefit themselves. Chapters 4 and 5 explain local attempts to resist developers by either villainizing developers or cooperating with those in power. Local residents failed to account for the systematic scaffolding of ordinances and zoning that would influence new development.Pilgeram's research is based on a local history conducted through interviews and local archives, presumably applicable to other rural western places, but the sociological approach does not engage the broader historiography of the rural American West, including Frederic Luebke's evaluation of the rural immigrant communities, Hal Rothman's Devil's Bargains, and R. Douglas Hurt's The Rural West since World War II. The “spatial fix” theory, which seems tied to the colonization process, undervalues many examples of local agency and power, but the analysis has significant value to understanding the postwar rural West.In Pushed Out, Pilgeram persuasively challenges several narratives of the rural West: the independent settler, the boom-and-bust cycle, and even that of the paternalistic company town. She argues that gentrification is not inevitable but “the product of a capitalist system reorganizing its exploitation of human and natural resources” for continued profit (164). Perhaps recognizing and understanding the authenticity inherent in a community's sense of place will allow the type of economic sustainability that actually defies the historic boom-and-bust cycle so attributed to the myth of “natural market cycles.”

Amenity · American west · Boom · Bust · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Ethnology · Frontier · Gentrification · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Engineering · History · Law