on the cover / By Ryan Burns

With a Rural Yell

As the state teeters on the brink, a local research center gives overlooked Californians a voice

(June 11, 2009)  It has become the embittered whine of the Obama era — the half-sarcastic, half-genuine plea of jealous sad sacks nationwide: “Where’s my bailout?” Those who’ve been suddenly knocked a few rungs down the capitalism ladder are looking around dumbfounded, wondering what the hell happened. But here on the Redwood Coast, there have long been struggling folks tucked in the verdant crannies along our rivers and hillsides, living in poverty on our reservations, even hiding in plain sight within our towns — folks whose troubles far predate the Wall Street collapse, the burst housing bubble and the unholy disaster of our state budget.

The economic crisis that has so many bankers and brokers in a tizzy hardly even registered with these down-and-out rural families here on the far north coast of our massive, unwieldy state. In a 2006 survey, nearly 20 percent of Humboldt County residents said they were unable to get needed health care during the previous 12 months. For those living in poverty that number was double. Twenty-three percent of low-income respondents couldn’t get necessary health care for their children. And almost one in 10 county residents experienced hunger because they couldn’t afford enough food. These are people who have needed a helping hand for years — generations, even — but they’ve been largely overlooked by the powers that be, not always because of callousness or indifference. They’re just hard to see from so far away.

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Until recently, policymakers have relied on patchwork information gathered by and housed in institutions hundreds of miles away from these citizens. Similarly, the assets of rural communities — our willingness to cooperate, our social bonds — are also overlooked, blurred into generalizations by groups analyzing the entirety of California, the country’s most populous state, which, if you haven’t heard, is on the verge of bankruptcy. State lawmakers, trying to close the $24.3 billion budget deficit, are considering unraveling huge sections of the social safety net, including eliminating Healthy Families, which provides health insurance for 930,000 low-income children, as well as CalWORKS, the state’s lauded welfare-to-work program.

Dr. Sheila Steinberg, an associate professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University, says there’s something deceptively simple that may be able to help poor, rural people in the region and throughout the state: data. As in, information — specific information on the issues affecting rural citizens, gathered methodically, housed locally and made available to both the public and the policymakers whose decisions affect them. “The average person doesn’t realize how important [data] is,” says Steinberg. “They think it’s just an academic thing. But really, data translates into money, because if you can show the need, if you can tell the story with the data — and document it — then you can go seek grants, and then you can help people.”

When she’s not teaching courses like “The Changing Family” and “Environmental Inequality and Globalization,” Steinberg serves as director of community research for the California Center for Rural Policy (CCRP), a research center housed on HSU’s campus whose goal is to help rural citizens through research conducted for and by those very citizens. For example, those statistics mentioned above concerning health care and hunger in Humboldt County? Those came from the CCRP. Since forming in the fall of 2005 the center has reported on such rural concerns as Internet connectivity, pesticide use and health care among the North Coast’s growing Latino community.

“Everybody has for a long time complained about the data that’s collected on our region,” says CCRP Executive Director and former Arcata Mayor Connie Stewart. “When we’re graded or rated, that data doesn’t really tell the story of what it is to live in rural California.” Often, she explains, vast rural areas are slapped with letter grades or numeric scores based on relatively small data samples collected from hundreds of miles away. For example, the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), a random-dial census conducted every other year by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, lumps together the counties of Del Norte, Siskiyou, Lassen, Trinity, Modoc, Plumas and Sierra. (Humboldt stands alone, but that’s hardly nuanced enough for the CCRP.) These broad surveys are regularly used to inform significant policy decisions made by legislators, local health departments, state agencies, community organizations and more. Not only does this method paint complex rural regions with too broad a brush, Stewart says, it inherently misrepresents the populace.

“We found out that about 14 percent of people don’t have a phone in the region of Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and Mendocino [counties], which is about the size of Connecticut and New Jersey put together,” Stewart says. “And of course the majority of those who don’t have a phone are poor. So you’re already skewing your data by electing to do a phone survey rather than a mail survey.” (CCRP directors explained the problem with phone surveys to CHIS personnel, who decided to change their methods next time around, Stewart says.)

The CCRP doesn’t just gather the information; they package it, along with existing data, into snazzy, colorful maps using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology. If you haven’t heard of GIS, you’ve almost certainly seen its results. Used in nifty technology like Google Earth, GIS offers a way to capture, manage and present data linked to location. Those red-and-blue electoral maps shown on cable news during the presidential election are one example of GIS mapping. While GIS has long been used in the natural sciences, the CCRP is one of just a few organizations combining the technology with the social sciences. Steinberg calls the resulting field “socio-spatial analysis” — the examination of people and their connection to space and place. The GIS maps created for the CCRP show such information as where poverty is most highly concentrated or even how local media portray Latinos.

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