A federal judge in 1972 ordered the merger of three Missouri school districts: Kinloch, Ferguson, and Berkeley. Ferguson, now known for the 2014 police killing of black teenager Michael Brown and the subsequent riots, was a white town back in the 1970s, along with Berkeley. Kinloch was black — famously black, in fact.
It’s the original all-black town in Missouri. Kinloch was incorporated in 1948 with a 100% black population. Its school district was combined with the neighboring towns a generation later, but Kinloch has consistently fought off efforts to merge the small town with its neighbors.
For years, Kinloch felt the pressure to disincorporate and get folded into Ferguson. For years, Kinloch resisted, even as the population fell from nearly 3,000 people to fewer than 300. In 2018, the county simply took over the local police department. An airport noise-abatement program took up much of Kinlock’s land and resulted in the demolition of many homes.
In the middle of the last decade, nonetheless, the state directed $6 million to build a new city hall and try to revitalize the dying town. Small towns all over ought to be watching to see if it works, because as America’s population flatlines, these quiet rural places are all trying to figure out how to manage decline.
In a different sort of “defund the police” move, coastal North Carolina town Hertford voted in March to look into disbanding its police department and letting the county sheriffs’ department take over law enforcement.
Scituate, Massachusetts, came in 33% under the school budget request, citing its shrinking population for the difference.
In Greentown, Indiana, they are planning on shrinking the town council from five members to three and scrapping the whole district idea, making all three seats at-large. Why? They’re having trouble finding candidates, which is a growing problem in shrinking towns.
A few, media-heavy parts of America are suffering the opposite fate. Spend 10 minutes in Austin, Texas, and everyone’s griping about it becoming overcrowded. But look at a map of America, and most of what you see are shrinking towns, figuring out how to grow small well.
