Dispatches From the Rural Edge
“The county estimated between 500 and 3,000 unhoused people. The shelter had 25 beds.”
We told our friends we would check back on them in the morning and left them out in the snow. Two were dead by morning. We lost a dozen friends that winter.
Those numbers have been rattling around in our heads for years. Not because they are dramatic. Because they were true. The gap is where rural organizing happens. It is also why the number of people we lost was not even higher.
Over the past several years Sabot Media has reported on housing, labor, mutual aid, homelessness, absentee landlords, shelter closures, development schemes, and local government failures. We have spoken with organizers from Texas to Gaza, from academics studying political polarization to Food Not Bombs chapters feeding people every week, and with people struggling to survive in places that rarely receive national attention.
The details differed. The lesson rarely did.
Again and again we encountered people solving enormous problems with remarkably few resources. During a Food Not Bombs roundtable discussion, organizers from Miami, Houston, West Palm Beach, Aberdeen, and elsewhere described dramatically different local conditions but remarkably similar challenges. The recurring problems were rarely ideological. They were practical. Reliable volunteers. Transportation. Burnout. Storage space. Keeping projects alive long enough to matter.
When there are only six people willing to do the work, purity becomes a luxury. Relationships become infrastructure. Reliability becomes political. The question stops being whether everyone shares identical politics and becomes whether they will show up next week.
Throughout this report we use the words rural and urban in a very specific way.
When we say rural, we do not mean conservative. We do not mean Republican. We do not mean agricultural. We do not even necessarily mean small towns. Likewise, when we say urban, we do not mean liberal, Democratic, progressive, or radical. Research increasingly suggests those political labels are more strongly associated with geography and proximity to metropolitan centers than with fundamental differences in values.
Instead, we are describing organizational conditions.
Rural
Peripheral communities with lower population density, fewer institutions, fewer organizers, fewer resources, and greater distance between people. They often experience high needs but receive comparatively little attention or investment.
Urban
Major metropolitan areas with high population density, overlapping organizations, greater institutional capacity, more media attention, more funding, and a much larger concentration of organizers and movement infrastructure.
This distinction is not about culture.
It is not about political identity.
It is not about whether a community is radical.
It is about capacity.
A rural community may be politically conservative or politically radical. An urban neighborhood may be wealthy or desperately poor. Both can experience injustice. What differs is the density of people, institutions, and resources available to respond. That difference shapes how organizing works. Grays Harbor is not unique. That is precisely the problem.
When Portland developer Terry Emmert began acquiring properties throughout Grays Harbor County, local residents learned a lesson familiar to rural communities throughout the country: some of the most important decisions affecting your town can be made by people who do not live there.
Years ago we wrote:
“So long as Terry Emmert maintains the illusion that he is investing into our city and ‘fixing’ these properties up, he is allowed to use them as tax shelters.”
Whether one agrees with every detail of that assessment is beside the point. The larger question remains: why does a developer living nearly two hundred miles away possess so much influence over housing conditions in a county he does not call home?
Every rural community has its own version of this story. A developer. A corporation. An investment fund. A mining company. A timber company. An absentee landlord. The names change. The industries change. The dynamic remains.
People often describe places like Grays Harbor as forgotten. That is not quite right. Forgotten implies nobody is paying attention. The reality is stranger. Rural communities are often intensely connected to the broader economy. Resources flow out. Wealth flows out. Young people leave. Decisions are made elsewhere. The profits go somewhere. The debts stay. The consequences stay.
Housing is only one example.
For years, local debates around homelessness in Grays Harbor have followed a familiar pattern. People living outside are moved from one location to another. Encampments are cleared. Vehicles are tagged and towed. Temporary solutions are proposed. Long-term solutions are promised. The conversation is forgotten. The crisis remains.
At various points local governments have spent more resources debating where unhoused people should not exist rather than where they should. During winter storms, organizers and mutual aid groups repeatedly found themselves attempting to fill gaps that entire well-resourced institutions seemed unable or unwilling to address. The numbers changed from year to year. The underlying problem did not.
As we wrote during one winter storm:
“Needless to say the county’s 25 bed shelter is insufficient to shelter even the lowest estimate.”
The lesson was difficult to ignore. The shortage was never just housing. It was capacity. Capacity to respond. Capacity to care. Capacity to imagine solutions beyond displacement.
And so we ask a simple question: where did everything go?
The jobs went somewhere. The investment went somewhere. The political attention went somewhere. The people went somewhere. The wealth certainly went somewhere. What remained were the consequences.
The dominant story about rural America is usually cultural. En masse rural people vote differently. They watch different television. They drive different vehicles. They worship in different churches. They use different political labels. Entire industries now exist to explain these differences. Yet after years of reporting and organizing, we have become increasingly convinced that these explanations miss something important.
Good people and assholes are distributed remarkably evenly across the landscape.
We have worked alongside evangelical church volunteers, union members, anarchists, recovering addicts, old-fashioned veterans, curious teenagers, cop-loving queer liberals, conservative loggers, fishermen, teachers, and people who could not explain the difference between a socialist and a socialite if their lives depended on it. Some became trusted comrades. Some became obstacles. All turned out to be far more complicated than their labels suggested.
A worker in Seattle may identify as progressive while a worker in Aberdeen identifies as conservative. One may distrust corporations while the other distrusts government. One may fly a pride flag while the other covers their truck in incoherent bumper stickers. Yet both may be struggling with housing costs, stagnant wages, inaccessible healthcare, childcare expenses, and the growing sense that decisions affecting their lives are being made somewhere else.
The labels differ.
The conditions often do not.
Research increasingly supports this observation. Studies from Washington University in St. Louis suggest that proximity to major metropolitan centers and population density are among the strongest predictors of partisan identity. Other researchers have found that political attitudes frequently exist along a continuum rather than a simple rural-urban divide. Geography appears to shape political labels far more than many organizers assume.
But labels are not values.
That distinction matters because many radicals, including anarchists, often organize backwards. We begin with identity. We ask whether someone is an anarchist, socialist, conservative, liberal, progressive, or leftist before we understand what they actually believe.
Saul Alinsky, a mid-20th century community organizer known for developing practical strategies for building grassroots power among working-class communities, understood something many organizers still struggle with. People rarely organize around theories. They organize around problems.
We have known these people.
A parent worried about rent who rejects every radical label but shows up to tenant meetings anyway. A logger who bristles at the word anarchist while talking for hours about absentee ownership and distant bureaucracies. A church volunteer who spends every weekend feeding hungry neighbors and insists they have no politics at all.
Then someone introduces a label. Suddenly the conversation changes. Not because the values changed. Because the label entered the room. This presents anarchists with a challenge. If our goal is genuinely to build popular power, are we more committed to our values or our branding?
Many of the people who could become our closest allies will never encounter anarchism through a book or a social media post. They will encounter it through a food distribution, a tenant campaign, a labor struggle, a disaster response, a community garden, or a mutual aid network. They will encounter it as a practice long before they encounter it as a label. The farther one moves from major metropolitan centers, the more obvious this becomes, as more and more of the people who show up are often not political radicals.
Part of the reason is scarcity.
Cities operate under conditions of organizational abundance. There are more organizations, more activists, more events, more coalitions, more media outlets, more meeting spaces, and more opportunities to participate. This abundance creates opportunities, but it also creates fragmentation. When dozens of organizations occupy the same ecosystem, ideological distinction becomes a useful way to separate one group from another.
Rural communities face a different reality.
The challenge is not distinguishing between twenty organizations. The challenge is finding six people willing to consistently show up. Anyone who has spent time organizing in a rural community understands this intuitively. During our conversations with Food Not Bombs organizers, the recurring problem was rarely ideological. It was practical. Who has a vehicle? Who has a kitchen? Who can make it every week? Who can be counted on six months from now?
In communities operating under conditions of scarcity, reliability often matters more than political precision because reliability is far harder to find.
That changes everything.
Relationships matter more. Reliability matters more. Capacity matters more. Organizers quickly learn that ideological sorting is a luxury. Coalition building becomes a necessity.
This scarcity is reinforced by decades of brain drain. Young people leave for jobs, education, healthcare, culture, and opportunity concentrated elsewhere. Organizers leave because that is where movements appear to be happening. Resources follow them. Attention follows them. Networks follow them. Communities lose organizers because they lack organizing infrastructure and lack organizing infrastructure because they lose organizers.
Grays Harbor offers a useful example of what scarcity looks like in practice. A handful of organizers often find themselves working across multiple projects simultaneously because there simply are not enough people available. The same person helping coordinate mutual aid may also be reporting local stories, attending city council meetings, supporting tenants, organizing events, distributing supplies, and maintaining relationships between groups that would otherwise have little contact with one another.
This is not unique to the Harbor. Organizers we spoke with from Texas to Gaza described remarkably similar conditions. Yet the experience is especially visible in rural communities because there are fewer institutions available to absorb the pressure. When something breaks, there is often no larger organization waiting to step in.
The work falls onto whoever remains. The results are visible in Grays Harbor. It is visible throughout the Rust Belt, Floridian swampland, flyover country, and in former mining towns, timber communities, agricultural regions, reservation lands, and struggling small towns throughout the country.
The details differ.
The pattern remains.
A comrade recently relocated and had this to say about their experience:
“As a small-town Organizer moving to Seattle, the culture of resistance cultivated in the big city was its own form of culture shock, it is vastly larger and different from what I had experienced at home, in Aberdeen, WA.
I’ve seen things here that build the culture of resistance in the city more than I could ever dream possible in my hometown, community gardens and pantries, public venues and event spaces, large scale actions and protests, anarchist bookstores and bookfairs, workers and tenants’ unions, community meals and workshops, and so much more. But all these amazing projects and organizations are divided, be it by Ideology, Class, Scale, legality etc…
Even the Anarchists seem further divided into various social cliques that feel much more isolated from each other than they should be. There is a weekly community meal I attend at a park in the city, at the time that it starts there are usually roughly 3-4 other organizations in the park at the same time also doing various forms of food distribution. They do not coordinate.
From churches bringing in various forms of donations and proselytism, to progressive liberal nonprofits bringing in clothes and PBS cameras, to anarchists throwing whatever food they are able to acquire that week legally or not on to a grill for the community. Even more so you have people making impromptu raves, LARPing troops, antifa kickball, and much more.
Yet, be it because of past conflicts or an aversion of working with organizations outside of those that comfortably fit within our own structures it seems there is absolutely zero communication between these organizations despite the exponential gains that could be gathered by working with each other, this is just simply not a luxury that we have in small towns.
Decentralization is a valid form of building dual power and a culture of resistance, but decentralization can only go so far without networking and communication. Networks like the ones in my hometown are in desperate need of communication and support from larger cities to give a booster shot from one culture of resistance to another, I fear how we can make this possible when city radicals are unable to network and communicate with themselves.”
~Seattle Based Anarchist
While it may be necessary to work outside of our immediate comfort zones in regards to individuals and their personal politics, there are, of course, lines not to be crossed. Such as working with the state, or police, and when it is time to consider working with an organization rather than an individual additional scrutiny and care should be used to determine that, in fact, the organization’s politics do closely align with your own. This is more important with regards to organizations rather than individuals.
In Aberdeen, organizers spent years fighting over shelter beds, encampments, and basic survival while developers and politicians promised future solutions. During our Food Not Bombs roundtable, participants from dramatically different places kept returning to the same problems: too few volunteers, too little money, too little time, and too much work. Whether the conversation was happening in Texas, Gaza, Florida, Washington, or elsewhere, the geography changed. The conversation rarely did.
The history of labor in Grays Harbor tells a similar story. Long before the current housing crisis, workers here were building unions, fighting timber barons, organizing through the Industrial Workers of the World, and struggling against concentrated economic power. The Harbor has never lacked for people willing to fight. What it has often lacked is the infrastructure necessary to sustain those fights across generations.
That distinction matters.
The problem facing many rural communities is not political apathy. It is organizational scarcity. There are people willing to do the work. There are not always enough resources to support them.
For years Sabot has documented the consequences of scarcity in Grays Harbor. The purpose of this article is not to convince readers that those consequences exist. They already do. The question is what we intend to do about them. Grays Harbor does not need sympathy. It needs solidarity. All your rural comrades do.
Not because these communities are uniquely deserving, but because they are attempting to solve enormous problems with remarkably few resources. A thousand dollars given to a large urban organization may barely register. The same thousand dollars can transform what is possible for a small rural project. The same is true of media attention, legal support, technical skills, research, transportation, design work, and human labor. Scarcity makes every resource matter more because there is so little margin for error.
If you believe rural communities matter, then allocate resources accordingly.
Fund rural media.
Support rural organizers.
Build relationships outside metropolitan centers.
Visit.
Report.
Collaborate.
Share skills.
Send money.
And when it makes sense, move here, love here, live here, work here.
For decades, wealth, institutions, media attention, political power, and organizing infrastructure have all concentrated into the same metropolitan centers. Too often our movements have followed the same path. The result is that enormous portions of the country are treated as recruiting grounds, campaign stops, or abstractions rather than places where lasting movement infrastructure should be built.
That concentration is not inevitable.
It is a choice.
Grays Harbor is sending an SOS.
So are communities throughout Appalachia, on the Navajo Nation, across the Delta, in former timber towns, mining communities, agricultural regions, and hundreds of places that rarely appear in movement strategy discussions except as abstractions.
The signal is already being sent.
The question is whether we continue concentrating our movements in the same places as wealth and power, or whether we begin building them in the places those forces have spent decades abandoning.
Sources & Further Reading
Reporting referenced throughout this article draws from Sabot Media’s ongoing coverage of housing, homelessness, labor, and mutual aid organizing, including:
- Who Is Terry Emmert?
- Report Back on the Cold Snap
- No Cold Weather Shelter for Aberdeen, WA
- Denied Shelter
- Despite Court Ruling, City of Aberdeen Refuses to Find Adequate Space for Homeless Encampment
- History of the Harbor’s Homeless
- An Open Letter to the City of Aberdeen
- Red Harbor: The IWW in Grays Harbor, Washington
Research referenced in the discussion of geographic political identity includes:
- Washington University in St. Louis, “The Divide Between Us: Urban-Rural Political Differences Rooted in Geography“
- University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy research on the rural-urban political continuum
- Cornell University research on rural-urban polarization and demographic sorting
- Stanford University research on geographic political realignment and representation