Category: Golden Oldies
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Broadband internet expansion no silver bullet for rural Georgia
(Editor’s Note: This column was initially published in today’s edition of the Georgia Recorder. It was submitted as a counterpoint to a piece that ran earlier this week in the Recorder.) Four years ago, I spoke to the opening day session of the House Rural Development Council about my research into the alarming decline of…
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Forget the “two Georgias,” welcome to Massassippi
I can’t remember whether he wrote it or said it, but years ago the legendary Atlanta Constitution editor Bill Shipp opined that if you lifted Metro Atlanta out of Georgia, what was left would be worse off than Mississippi. I remember it because I’m from Mississippi and my first reaction was: Really? There might be…
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Political common ground hard to find in Georgia. Literally.
A few days after Georgia’s 2018 elections, I did a quick analysis and wrote a piece positing that the state’s widening urban-rural divide went beyond economics and education and extended to politics. Rural areas seemed to be going more and more Republican while urban and suburban areas were trending more Democratic. Recently I’ve finally gotten…
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South Georgia vs. Gwinnett County
Here’s an easy way to understand the widening gap between Metro Atlanta and the rest of Georgia. Compare all 56 counties of interior South Georgia to Gwinnett County alone. Gwinnett County’s 2013 population was estimated at 859,304 – just under three-fourths of the 1.16 million people living in our 56-county South Georgia region. But despite…