Respecting your neighbors is a theme that I've been trying to school at least one recent self described "moderately wealthy" arrival to the Valley.
One of the reasons we have a housing shortage and lack available rentals is because of water availability issues.
Some new wealthy arrivals seem to want lavish Landscaping, many using water for 20 acres of green lawn. I'm guessing that a lot of the water comes from the ditch which was previously issued as a water right for agricultural use.
I'm not familiar enough with water right laws to understand why water can be switched from agricultural use to residential use.
But I do know that if you're drawing water from a permit exempt well you cannot water more than 1/2 acre of lawn and garden.
I believe that if you're drawing water from one of the special wells in one the closed basins, that you can not irrigate any amount of lawn. But I do need to research that some more.
This is coming from someone who doesn't believe in locking the gate to the Methow. As far as I'm concerned all are welcome.
However, that lack of water equity in sharing a limited resource will stop development here in the Methow Valley and put a lot of locals out of work.
The very same locals that most likely helped to build the homes in which every new person to the valley resides.
What's so funny 'bout peace love and understanding--Nick Lowe
Can't talk to a man who don't want to understand--Carol King
Seems like educated people are thinking too much about a problem that really isn't there. I came to the methow valley some 25 years ago or so. I had very little going for me financially and was escaping city life that seemed dangerous for a mentally ill disabled veteran. so I ran away and here I am. I am allowed to live here mostly undisturbed by the few riff raffs Twisp does have wandering around. I like it here. Funny some outside study finding out how miserable we are here. not really sure why it gets noticed. I have books about the Methow Valley that are way better for sale on www.TristanGilbert.com .
Dividing Paradise: Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
"Conversations about housing, rapid community change, and neighborhood inequality often stop at the edge of American cities. But for places that have found stability by reorienting the local economy toward tourism, the story is more complicated. As Sherman follows residents of Paradise Valley, Washington, who struggle to find affordable housing, adapt to new economic opportunities, and navigate class and generational conflict, her book illuminates deep divides. Rather than valorizing or mourning, Dividing Paradise offers a fresh, forward-looking perspective on rural America that does not shy away from its complex, modern problems. Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize&;winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this book shines new light on social class in America today by studying the clash between long-standing residents of a rural community struggling with economic precarity and well-heeled urban newcomers who are attracted to the community's natural amenities but also blind to their own class privilege."&;Leif Jensen, Distinguished Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography, The Pennsylvania State University
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
From the Back Cover
"Conversations about housing, rapid community change, and neighborhood inequality often stop at the edge of American cities. But for places that have found stability by reorienting the local economy toward tourism, the story is more complicated. As Sherman follows residents of Paradise Valley, Washington, who struggle to find affordable housing, adapt to new economic opportunities, and navigate class and generational conflict, her book illuminates deep divides. Rather than valorizing or mourning, Dividing Paradise offers a fresh, forward-looking perspective on rural America that does not shy away from its complex, modern problems."—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
"Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this book shines new light on social class in America today by studying the clash between long-standing residents of a rural community struggling with economic precarity and well-heeled urban newcomers who are attracted to the community's natural amenities but also blind to their own class privilege."—Leif Jensen, Distinguished Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography, The Pennsylvania State University --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Jennifer Sherman is Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington State University. She is the author of Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America and a coeditor of Rural Poverty in the United States. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Hello? — A troubling portrayal of the Methow
AUGUST 4, 2021 BY SOLVEIG TORVIK
The Methow Valley is a deeply divided community where wealthy urbanites “blind” to their privilege “hoard” their social capital while impoverished, excluded, resentful rural old-timers struggle to survive.
This is the disturbing thesis of a new book, “Dividing Paradise; Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream,” authored by Washington State University associate professor of sociology Jennifer Sherman and published by University of California Press.
This is not the community many of us believe we’re living in — especially those “newcomers” who’ve put decades of effort into building an extraordinary community here. So it’s a book well worth reading by anyone who cares about everyone who lives in the Methow.
Sherman’s conclusions are provocative. The Methow many of us so smugly assume is a model of a caring community with widespread civic engagement in her telling reads instead much like a cautionary tale of a failed society.
She did field research here in 2014-15, documenting the effect of educated, well-off, urban “amenity migrants” on the lives of less-privileged old-timers. (She changed the place names and names of sources.)
Sherman picked the Methow for study, she said in an interview, because it’s unique in rural America for its successful transformation from extractive to tourist mecca economy.
Why, then, despite decades of community-building efforts by dedicated volunteers and generous donors, have we not managed to create a community, or an economy, that meets the basic needs of the poorest among us? Wrong priorities? Hello?
“That a place that’s trying so hard still has these problems speaks to me of the size of the problem” of economic and social inequality, Sherman said. Inequality is a national problem feeding the politics of grievance, she adds.
Lack of affordable housing, full-time employment and competent child care remain formidable barriers to success for old-timers, she writes.
In addition, the Methow Valley School District “plays an important role in the reproduction and maintenance of inequality within the valley,” acting as a social “sorting” mechanism, Sherman adds. She acknowledges recent improvements but adds the school district “has a long way to go in terms of addressing educational inequality.”
Invisible challenges
Yet these challenges for old-timers are largely invisible to newcomers, who she found are often dismissive of the valley’s poor and blame them for their plight.
The caring community we think we’ve built is one that too often cares for — and shares its social capital with — mostly privileged people just like ourselves, Sherman damningly observes. Judgement, social boundaries and exclusion of old-timers flourishes even among those who recognized social inequality and expressed a desire to change it, she found.
Old-timers often view newcomers with cynicism and disdain, she rightly notes.
The valley’s impressive, urban-structured, nonprofit charity networks allow middle-class residents “to care about people in the abstract versus in person, to be concerned with issues rather than individuals, and to give to those in need without actually bridging the social divide between the haves and the have-nots,” Sherman writes.
This is not how rural people understand community is done, she adds. Sincere help is given person to person, not at an institutional remove.
While newcomers express satisfaction with their networks and community connections here, old timers often lack those critical connections. They feel judged, excluded and unsupported, she writes. Moreover, newcomers have pushed aside old-timers and deprived them of their voice and power to set the agenda for their community.
The soul-sickening stress of financial insecurity and loss of hope to overcome it that’s felt by many valley residents is starkly documented by Sherman, who notes that she’s never seen people living in worse housing squalor than she saw here.
Rural values can be stubborn, self-sabotaging barriers to success that old-timers erect for themselves, she acknowledges. There’s the deep stigma of accepting help that humiliatingly brands you as a dependent, “less-than” person, she writes, and an ingrained, conservative ethic that it’s a moral failure to accept government help.
Could do better
Sherman also notes the unforgiving nature of small communities, where those who make a mistake often are stamped for a lifetime with a bad reputation that can hinder their efforts to find employment.
“I don’t think this is a failing community,” Sherman said. “In so many ways the valley has benefitted so much from the energy of newcomers. I hope that comes through.” But the community could do better, she added, if people were more aware of sharing the benefits of the valley’s economic growth with old-timers.
No one she interviewed “ever said we shouldn’t have tourism,” Sherman added. Rather, she said, “the take-home was, ‘I wish they’d think about me, too.’”
Some of this conflict strikes me as less about money and more about urban-versus rural values. Urbanites who have never lived in small communities too often do arrive here blind, tone deaf and clueless, disrespectful of rural people and bereft of the social skills and social intelligence they need to live here.
City dwellers survive in cities by tuning out people around them. But here, those people are our neighbors. “Neighboring,” the late Ken Westman’s term, means respecting other human beings enough to help them. In a rural community, that neighbor might one day be you, as early settlers well understood and old timers still do. Neighboring isn’t done by contributing to a charity, however worthy. It requires personal engagement.
And perhaps a little attitude adjustment by newcomers and old-timers alike.
Solveig Torvik, a “newcomer,” lives near Winthrop.
