Aerial view of the Anchorage skyline and Mt. Susitna in the distance on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015.
(Bill Roth / ADN) If you drive across the Rust Belt in the Lower 48, you’ll encounter them here and there: half-empty towns with schools and storefronts boarded up, waiting for an economic upswing that may never come. The feeling of a place with its best days in the rearview mirror is one of desperation: Without a plan to adapt to a changing world, the withering towns’ young people leave for places where jobs are more plentiful and opportunities are brighter. The older generation and those too poor or stubborn to relocate find themselves in a downward spiral of fewer services, declining value for their homes and the inescapable reality that in a generation or two, the place where they grew up may no longer exist.
Here in Alaska, our primary experience with that kind of grim outcome came more than a century ago, as gold rush boomtowns sprang into existence and disappeared almost as quickly, sometimes only a few years later. The luckiest of those boomtowns — Fairbanks, Nome, Juneau — developed enough of an economic base to sustain them once the rush was over, but many more exist only as footnotes in history books and dots on 120-year-old maps. And now, instead of the quick bloom and fade of a resource rush, Alaska is facing a new kind of economic headwind: the kind of slow decline those Lower 48 towns have been experiencing for decades.
The bad news is that the sort of dimi.