Welcome to SOWEGA (aka Third World Georgia)

Time was when Albany was the center of commerce and political power in southwest Georgia.  Back in my newspapering days, nearly a half-century ago, the governor, George Busbee, and State Senate majority leader, Al Holloway, both hailed from Albany.  So did a former chairman of the State Democratic Party, James H. Gray, Sr., who also owned the influential Albany Herald and WALB-TV, the dominant television station in southwest Georgia.  That was a lot of political juice for that corner of the state.  Albany rarely had to stand in line at the State Capitol.

But somewhere along the way Albany’s luck began to change.  Perhaps as harbingers of hard times to come, the city and the region began to suffer more than their fair share of natural disasters.  Hurricanes, tropical storms and tornadoes spawned in the Gulf of Mexico started using the area for target practice.  

A 1994 storm dumped 25 inches of rain on the city, flushing more than 400 coffins from their graves and sending them floating down flooded streets.  The 2005 Mother’s Day Tornado plowed through the city with winds of at least 136 miles an hour and left millions of dollars in damage in its wake.

(As I’m writing this column, Hurricane Debby is bearing down on the Florida panhandle and South Georgia.  Governor Brian Kemp has already declared a state of emergency.)

As Covid-19 was taking hold in 2020, a pair of local funerals turned into early super-spreader events and sent the virus flying through the community.  For a time, Albany had one of the highest Covid-19 infection rates in the nation and the local hospital was all but overwhelmed.  

The only thing missing was a plague of locusts.

I bring all this up to make a couple of points, one broad and one more specific.

The broad point is that any revival of rural Georgia will have to hinge on figuring out how to leverage the cities and even small towns that anchor the state’s sprawling rural territories.  I arrived at that fairly obvious judgement a good while back and I’ve talked to enough other knowledgeable people to know I’m not the only one who believes this.  The problem is that nobody’s figured out exactly how to do it.

The more specific point is that southwest Georgia – aka SOWEGA – will have to depend on Albany to help fuel any revival in that woebegone part of the state, and Albany is in no better shape than the rest of the region.  Combined, they arguably constitute Exhibit A in Georgia for what happens when a region devolves into Third World status.

I don’t use that term lightly.  “Third World” was originally a Cold War term used to describe nations that were neutral or not aligned with either the Western or Eastern blocs.  Over time it took on socio-economic connotations and came to refer to nations that were still developing economically.

Definitions of “Third World” can be a little fuzzy, but my ChatGPT app gives me a pretty good set of criteria that I think could be fairly applied to regions of the state or nation.

• Economic Development: Limited industrialization and lower GDP per capita.
• Infrastructure: Inadequate infrastructure, including healthcare, education, and transportation.
• Human Development: Lower scores on human development indices, which include factors like life expectancy, education, and income.
• Political Stability: Often experiencing political instability, corruption, and sometimes conflict.
• Poverty: High levels of poverty and inequality.

Pick your metric.  Between 2017 and 2022, gross domestic product (GDP) in the 15 counties I include in the SOWEGA region grew by 7.0%, just a little over half the statewide average.  Nearly every county in the region has lost population in recent years, and only one had more births than deaths in 2022.  That was Lee County, the white flight county north of Albany and Dougherty County; it recorded 313 births to 311 deaths.  

As a region, SOWEGA has approximately 32,000 college graduates and 28,000 high school dropouts, according to the latest American Community Survey estimates (and that positive margin owes entirely to the aforementioned Lee County; without it, high school dropouts outnumber college graduates).  Poverty rates in 14 of the 15 counties exceed 20%, topped by Calhoun County at a breathtaking 34%.  Childhood poverty rates are even worse.

Dougherty County, of which Albany is the county seat, has been losing population and watching its economy stagnate for a good while now.  It is, in other words, in no position to spark or lead a regional revival.  But maintaining the status quo – let alone suffering continued decline – should not be an option.