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HKYNC News & Views Dec 14, 2025 – Executive Summary
Hickory Hound News and Views Archive
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📤This Week:
(Monday): The Stolen Recovery: When The Numbers Stop Matching The Town (Part 1 of 9 on The Hound's Signal) - Shows how Small City economies looks stable on paper while daily life tells a different story. Buildings, wages, debt, and opportunity are all mispriced at once, creating a recovery that never reaches the people doing the work. This series explains the disconnect and who absorbs the cost.
(Thursday): ⚙️Structural Schisms 7: The Absent Innovation Core - Hickory’s economy still builds things but no longer builds new things. This report explains how the region’s missing innovation core—fragmented institutions, risk-averse culture, and lack of R&D—suppresses wages, drains talent, and locks the city into economic dependence. Rebuilding requires leadership, coordination, and deliberate invention.
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📤Next Week:
(Monday): PRODUCT DEPTH: THE HIDDEN SIGNAL OF MARKET COLLAPSE (Part 3 of 9 on The Hound's Signal)
(Tuesday): Hickory 101: Lesson 7 – The Local Lens - the purpose of this lesson — to show you that Hickory isn’t just a local story. It’s a reflection of national patterns that hit early, hit hard, and leave marks that don’t fade.
(Thursday): ⚙️Structural Schisms 8: Fading from the Map - looks at how Hickory’s identity has weakened as its institutions—newspapers, schools, churches, and civic groups—lose influence. The city’s story once bound generations together; now that story is breaking apart. This essay explores what happens when a community forgets itself, and what it will take to remember again.
Friday: WHY MARKET COMPLETENESS RARELY RETURNS ONCE LOST (Part 4 of 9 on The Hound's Signal)
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🧠Opening Reflection: – City Building Leverage
When I sit down to write this reflection, I am reminded how long Hickory has been living between what it was and what so many of us longtimers hoped it would grow into—and how stubbornly we still hold onto that hope. For seventeen years I have documented the same patterns on The Hickory Hound—signals that repeat themselves no matter who is in office or what ribbon gets cut. Population numbers rise, but capacity does not—capacity meaning the city’s ability to generate, retain, and multiply real economic and institutional growth. Wages inch forward while the cost of living surges past them. Schools strain under responsibilities that were never meant to rest on their shoulders.
The daily details change; the long-term structure does not.
I have watched this city become a place where people come to settle, not to build. That is not a moral failure. It is the natural outcome of a model optimized for affordability rather than opportunity. And every previous News & Views has touched that truth from a different angle.
In November, I wrote about the city drifting without a center of gravity—Hickory lacking an anchor institution or economic engine. Nothing holds the city in place or pulls opportunity toward it.
In early fall, I covered the growing institutional fatigue—schools, services, and civic systems carrying more instability than they can reasonably bear because the local economic model produces more strain than stability.
Months before that, we looked at how the region markets itself as a refuge instead of an engine—Hickory’s public identity framed around being affordable and quiet, not as a place where people can climb, invest, or build durable futures.
At first glance, these look like separate problems. They are not.
All three point to the same underlying reality: Hickory is no longer necessary to any larger system. A city that is not needed by anyone above it has no leverage. A city with no leverage cannot build or hold capacity. That is why the symptoms keep shifting while the structure never truly changes.
Those were not isolated observations. They were pieces of a single structural problem.
This week, the picture sharpens.
Because underneath all the noise—the festivals, the branding slogans, the incremental wins—Hickory is missing the one thing that determines whether a city rises or becomes optional: leverage.
Not political leverage. Structural leverage.
A city only gains leverage when larger systems need it. That is the signal every strong city sends long before the public notices the transformation. You can see it in the signals of necessity described in the Feature story:
Cities with universities that produce specialized talent and keep it in the region.
Cities with industry clusters that anchor wages instead of suppressing them.
Cities with institutions that the state cannot easily replace or ignore.
Cities that hold onto their young instead of exporting them to Charlotte, Raleigh, or beyond.
Those are the engines that create gravity. Hickory once had something like that in the manufacturing era. But usefulness and necessity are not the same thing, and when the old industries collapsed, nothing structural replaced them. What followed—low wages, demographic churn, school overload, a constant drain of young talent (Brain drain)—were not random failures. They were the telltale signs of a city losing leverage before it even understood that leverage was its only real protection.
The strange part is that Hickory is not without signs of possibility. Microsoft’s quiet land assembly. The widening of 321. The slow reshaping of the I-40 corridor. The increased pressure building along the outer edge of Charlotte’s orbit. These are early indicators—weak signals—that the region still sits at a crossroads between irrelevance and resurgence.
But signals only matter if a city has the architecture to respond. Without that architecture, they do not turn into capacity; they turn into missed opportunities.
And that is where this week’s Feature turns its attention:
What system is Hickory actually operating in?
What trajectory does that system produce if nothing changes?
And what would it take to rebuild the leverage this city has lost?
Leverage is not about size. It is not about slogans. It is not about nostalgia. It is about becoming necessary again—economically, institutionally, and strategically. As you will see in the Feature, Hickory has been running on an Affordability Model—a low-wage, low-gravity system that stabilizes vulnerability instead of building capacity (a growth engine model). The Affordability model explains nearly everything: talent leaving, fragility arriving, schools buckling, wages stalling, and a civic narrative shrinking by the year.
The Feature lays out the framework, the forecast, and the decision levers clearly. My job in this reflection is simpler: to say out loud what many people in this region have felt for years but could not yet name.
Hickory is running out of time to decide what it wants to be in the structure of North Carolina.
Either we build leverage—real leverage—or we accept a future where the rest of the state moves on without us. The clock is not theoretical. The signals are already all around us. And the longer a city waits to claim necessity, the harder it is to earn it back.
This week’s Feature is not about collapse. It is about consequences—and the narrowing window still open for a different outcome.
Let’s get to work.
⭐ Feature Story ⭐ - City Building Leverage
SEGMENT I — SIGNAL IDENTIFICATION
Every city broadcasts signals about its future long before the public recognizes what those signals mean. These signals emerge from population patterns, wage structures, institutional strength, and the character of the people a city attracts or loses. They are not dramatic. They are not loud. But they are decisive. A community’s trajectory is rarely a surprise to those who know how to read the early indicators.
For Hickory, the first and most telling signal is the absence of necessity. Strong cities become essential to systems larger than themselves — ports, universities, state headquarters, industry clusters, research centers, transportation hubs. These institutions give a city gravity. Hickory once had economic usefulness in the manufacturing era, but usefulness is not the same as necessity. When the old industries left, nothing structural replaced them. A city that is no longer necessary becomes optional, and optional cities lose leverage.
The second major signal comes from demographic composition. Who arrives, who leaves, and why tells you more about a city’s future than any development plan or political slogan. Hickory has been promoted — nationally and locally — as an affordable refuge. That signal attracts people who need stability, not opportunity. Retirees seeking low costs, low-wage workers seeking survival, and displaced families seeking to reset lives are not failures of character; they are responding rationally to the city’s value proposition. But an affordability-driven inflow does not regenerate economic strength. It produces population without leverage.
The third signal is the pattern of talent outmigration. A city’s ability to retain its young, skilled, and ambitious residents is a direct measure of its structural vitality. Hickory educates many, but keeps few. The region’s best graduates consistently leave for cities with stronger institutions, broader professional ladders, and higher wage ceilings. When a community exports its future producers and imports its future dependents, the imbalance becomes visible in its wage structures, civic culture, and institutional strain.
The fourth signal is the condition of public institutions, especially schools. Schools are not simply educational systems; they are diagnostic tools. They reveal the socioeconomic condition of the community. When schools become mechanisms of stabilization — handling poverty, trauma, churn, and linguistic complexity — that means the economic system is offloading its failures onto the educational system. This does not happen in cities with strong economic engines; it happens in cities absorbing more fragility than opportunity.
The fifth signal is wage stagnation relative to regional and national trends. Hickory’s median household income has lagged 25–30% behind the national average for two decades. This is not a random gap; it is a structural signal indicating that the local economy relies on low-wage labor and does not generate high-value sectors. When wages remain suppressed, skilled workers leave, employers expect compliance rather than development, and the entire system reinforces low mobility.
Together, these five signals — necessity, demographic composition, talent retention, institutional strain, and wage structure — form Hickory’s structural fingerprint. They reveal the current model without sentiment or illusion. Importantly, the signals do not tell us what to do; they simply tell us where we stand. Interpretation comes next.
Segment II builds directly on these signals. It does not repeat them. It answers the essential question: What do these signals actually mean for the city’s identity and its future? Every subsequent segment flows from that interpretive step.
SEGMENT II — INTERPRETATION
Signals become meaningful only when they are interpreted correctly. Data is not understanding, and observations alone do not produce insight. Interpretation is where a community confronts the meaning behind the evidence. This is the step that determines whether a city responds to its circumstances with clarity or drifts further into confusion. Segment II does not restate the signals from Segment I; instead, it answers the real question: What do those signals say about Hickory’s underlying condition?
The first interpretation is sobering but essential: Hickory is not in a temporary downturn — it is living inside a structural model that no longer aligns with the modern economy. The core economic engine that once supported the region vanished decades ago. What replaced it was not a next-generation sector or an institution of regional influence. Instead, the vacuum was filled by affordability-driven growth, low-wage labor, and demographic patterns shaped by survival rather than ambition. That is not a momentary fluctuation; it is a long-term structural shift.
The second interpretation concerns the nature of the inflow population. For more than ten years, Hickory has been framed — intentionally or unintentionally — as a “most affordable” destination. The national media amplified this perception, and local entities rarely corrected it. People who respond to affordability signals usually arrive looking for relief from economic pressure. That does not make them unworthy residents. But it does mean the city is not attracting individuals who are selecting a place for professional opportunity, upward mobility, or access to high-value networks. In other words, Hickory is drawing seekers of cost, while Charlotte, Raleigh, Asheville, and Wilmington draw seekers of capacity.
The third interpretation is tied to talent outmigration. When a city continually loses the people most capable of shaping its future, it becomes a place defined by limits rather than possibilities. Hickory’s inability to retain its own young adults is not a cultural issue, nor is it a matter of poor community spirit. It is a direct reflection of the wage structure and institutional landscape. A region without economic ladders does not keep climbers. Instead, it becomes a launchpad for those with ambition and a holding zone for those with fewer options.
The fourth interpretation follows naturally from the strain visible in schools and civic institutions. When educational systems operate as stabilization centers, they reveal a fundamental imbalance: the local economy is not strong enough to support the population it attracts. This is not an indictment of educators; it is a structural reality. Schools absorb the consequences of the labor market. When a city’s economic base produces low wages, thin margins, and high instability, schools inherit the fallout. That strain is not a sign of institutional failure — it is evidence of systemic misalignment.
The fifth interpretation concerns identity drift. Cities that thrive have a coherent sense of purpose. They know who they are and what role they play in the wider region. Hickory’s identity, once rooted in manufacturing expertise, has not been replaced with a modern equivalent. As a result, the city now occupies an undefined space — not a regional hub, not a college town, not a logistics center, not an innovation district, not a cultural anchor. The absence of a clear identity is not cosmetic. It directly affects investment, population composition, and political relevance.
Taken together, these interpretations reveal a central truth: Hickory is living within a system optimized for affordability, not opportunity. Everything else flows from that. Wage suppression makes sense within that model. Talent loss makes sense. Institutional overload makes sense. Slow economic velocity makes sense. None of this is random, and none of it can be reversed through piecemeal improvements.
This interpretive framework is not a verdict; it is a clarification. A city cannot rebuild leverage until it understands the meaning of the signals it is sending and receiving. Hickory’s situation is not the result of a single decision or a failure of leadership. It is the natural outcome of a model that stabilizes vulnerability rather than elevating capacity.
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SEGMENT III — FRAMEWORK
Understanding the signals and interpreting their meaning sets the stage for the most important step: identifying the framework that produces the city’s outcomes. A framework is the architecture beneath the surface — the system of incentives, defaults, and structural constraints that shape how a city functions. If the interpretation shows “what the signals mean,” the framework shows why those meanings keep repeating, year after year, across different institutions and administrations.
For Hickory, the governing framework of the past two decades can be described as the Affordability Model. This model did not arise through conscious choice. It formed gradually as the city lost its manufacturing foundation, failed to develop new institutional anchors, and became increasingly defined by low costs rather than high-value opportunities. Once the framework took hold, it shaped every other outcome: who moved in, who moved out, how schools functioned, how wages stagnated, and how the city’s cultural and political relevance slowly narrowed.
The first structural pillar of the Affordability Model is cost-based attraction. A place positioned as “affordable” becomes attractive primarily to individuals and households seeking relief from financial pressure. There is nothing morally wrong with that, but affordability-based attraction carries limitations. It draws people who are looking to stabilize, not to expand. Their arrival keeps population numbers steady, but it does not replenish the city’s economic engine. High-wage earners, entrepreneurs, researchers, and young professionals do not select cities based on affordability alone; they select them based on networks, institutions, and opportunity ladders. Hickory’s framework attracts the former and loses the latter.
The second pillar is the Replacement Economy. Hickory educates a significant number of young people but cannot retain them. The city’s most capable residents graduate, gain credentials, and then leave for metros where their talents multiply in value. Meanwhile, the newcomers replacing them often have limited economic mobility, constrained income, or instability that requires public support. The city appears demographically stable, but the internal composition shifts toward greater socioeconomic vulnerability. The Replacement Economy creates a population that grows in number but shrinks in capacity, compounding the community’s long-term challenges.
The third pillar is wage suppression, a predictable outcome of a cost-driven model. Employers in affordable regions are rarely pressured to raise wages because affordability itself becomes a substitute for economic opportunity. The logic becomes circular: people come because it is cheap, and because people come, employers feel no urgency to generate high-wage work. Over time, this cements a low-wage equilibrium that discourages high-skill workers and high-value employers from settling in the region. Wage stagnation is not an accident — it is a structural feature of the model.
The fourth pillar is institutional load-bearing, particularly within the public schools. When a city attracts households struggling economically, its institutions inherit the strain. Schools become responsible for stabilizing children who are experiencing poverty, trauma, language barriers, transience, or family instability. Teachers become social workers, nurses become crisis responders, and administrators become managers of complexity far beyond education. These burdens are not caused by poor leadership within the schools — they are downstream effects of the economic and demographic structure surrounding them.
The fifth pillar is identity drift. Cities that build leverage have a clear sense of purpose reinforced by institutions, industries, or cultural assets. Cities that rely on affordability do not have a story grounded in ambition; they have a story grounded in survival. This does not inspire investment or confidence. Over time, the narrative of “affordable refuge” becomes the city’s calling card, attracting more people who are looking to escape hardship and fewer who are looking to build the future.
When these five pillars operate together, they create the Affordability Model in full: a system where the city appears stable but is structurally prevented from rising. The model explains why improvements feel cyclical, why wages remain low, why schools strain, why young talent leaves, and why the city’s regional influence continues to diminish.
The key realization is this: you cannot fix a framework by improving the symptoms it creates. You cannot solve wage suppression by asking employers to be generous. You cannot fix institutional strain by begging for better test scores. You cannot fix talent loss by running marketing campaigns. The framework must be changed, not decorated.
This leads directly into Segment IV: Trajectory — the future the current model will produce if nothing changes, and the structural consequences of allowing the framework to continue operating unchallenged.
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SEGMENT IV — TRAJECTORY
A trajectory is not a prediction; it is a structural path. Once a framework is in place, a city moves along the lines that framework permits. The Affordability Model outlined in Segment III produces its own momentum. If nothing interrupts it, the system continues generating the same outcomes with increasing force and clarity. Segment IV describes where Hickory is headed under the current model — not as punishment, not as drama, but as the logical continuation of the architecture in place.
The most immediate future is defined by population growth without upward mobility. Hickory will almost certainly continue to grow numerically. Retirees seeking cheaper housing, families priced out of larger metros, and low-wage workers seeking stability will keep arriving. On the surface, this looks like progress: rising census numbers, increased housing demand, more commercial activity at the level of basic services. But numerical growth does not mean economic ascension. If the inflow continues to consist primarily of economically fragile households, the city’s per capita income, wage structure, and institutional demands will continue moving in the same direction they have for nearly two decades.
The second phase of the trajectory is deepening wage stagnation. A low-wage equilibrium rarely corrects itself. Employers hold down wages not because they are malicious, but because the regional labor market allows it. For years, Hickory has signaled that affordability is its value proposition. That signal attracts workers who accept low wages because they believe the cost structure compensates for it. But as housing prices rise faster than wages — something already happening across Catawba County — the community drifts into a dangerous zone: low wages without low costs. This produces the quiet erosion of household stability and increases pressure on institutions like schools, healthcare providers, and social services.
The third part of the trajectory is institutional overload, especially within education. Schools will continue to absorb the consequences of the city’s demographic mix: higher poverty, more instability, more linguistic and cultural barriers, and less parental bandwidth. Teachers will be expected to operate as stabilizers, not instructors. Principals will run triage centers. District budgets will stretch thin to cover needs that originate outside the classroom. None of this results from inadequate educators; it results from the city’s economic structure. If nothing changes, the institutional strain will deepen, and the system will begin to show visible signs of chronic fatigue.
The fourth part is accelerating talent loss. When a region offers limited professional opportunity and rising institutional strain, the people most capable of influencing the city’s future — its brightest young adults — will continue to leave for places with stronger institutional ecosystems. This outmigration will not be evenly distributed. The students with the highest potential for upward mobility will be the first to depart. Over a decade, this produces a measurable gap: fewer high-skill professionals, fewer entrepreneurs, fewer innovators, fewer civic leaders with long-term commitment. The city will still have good people, but it will have fewer people with leverage.
The fifth part of the trajectory is civic narrative contraction. Instead of defining a forward-looking identity, the community’s sense of self narrows to nostalgia, affordability, or quiet resignation. The city becomes known not for what it contributes to the region, but for what it costs to live there. This narrative shapes expectations: young people stop imagining futures in Hickory, investors seek more ambitious markets, and residents accept slow decline as normal. A diminished narrative does not ruin a city overnight, but it erodes the cultural confidence needed to rebuild.
Finally, the long-term trajectory leads to regional marginalization. North Carolina’s economic center of gravity is consolidating around four metros — Charlotte, Raleigh, Asheville, and Wilmington. These cities have leverage because they have institutions, talent pipelines, and economic engines that matter to the state. Hickory’s influence will shrink in comparison. Policy decisions at the state level will increasingly bypass the region. Investment will favor the engines of growth. Hickory may remain functional, but it will not be central.
This trajectory is not dramatic. It is slow, steady, and predictable. But it is not irreversible. Trajectories change when frameworks change. A community that understands where it is heading can make strategic decisions that redirect its future.
That’s the purpose of Segment V: identifying the structural levers capable of altering the path — and the conditions under which change becomes possible.
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SEGMENT V — STRUCTURAL FORECAST & DECISION LEVERS
A structural forecast is not about guessing the future; it is about understanding the future a system is already producing. If Hickory continues operating inside the Affordability Model, the trajectory outlined in Segment IV will unfold with increasing clarity. The question this segment answers is not what happens next — it is what could happen instead. A real forecast lays out both: the continuation of current momentum and the specific interventions that could alter it. These “decision levers” are not tactical fixes. They are structural changes capable of shifting the city from a low-wage containment model into an opportunity-driven model.
The first part of the forecast is straightforward: without intervention, Hickory will drift deeper into its current role as a low-cost absorption zone for retirees, displaced households, and low-wage workers. The wage structure will remain suppressed, institutional strain will grow, and the economic base will become increasingly dependent on service-sector employment that does not generate upward mobility. The region won’t collapse — decline rarely looks violent — but it will settle into a long-term posture of diminished relevance.
But this is only the default scenario. A structural forecast also identifies the pathways out. Hickory will not reverse its course through beautification, branding campaigns, municipal slogans, or nostalgia-based appeals. A city escapes decline only through structural leverage, and structural leverage is built deliberately, not accidentally.
The first lever is institutional anchoring. No mid-sized city has regained regional influence without building or securing an anchor institution — a university expansion, a research center, a specialty healthcare campus, a technical institute with statewide significance, or a public-private innovation hub. Hickory lacks such an anchor, and that absence is the primary reason the region remains optional in the state’s strategic calculus. An anchor institution creates gravity; gravity attracts talent, investment, and political relevance. Without gravity, nothing else sticks.
The second lever is economic specialization. Cities that rise do not try to be cheaper versions of larger metros; they identify a sector where they can become exceptional. For Hickory, this might involve advanced manufacturing, materials science, data infrastructure, aerospace support industries, outdoor product design, or applied technologies linked to existing regional strengths. Specialization requires choosing, and choosing means saying no to scattered initiatives that dilute resources. A city gains leverage by becoming necessary to a specific economic ecosystem.
The third lever is talent retention and creation, the most decisive factor in long-term regional competitiveness. Hickory cannot keep exporting its most capable young adults and expect to grow. Retention requires visible opportunity, not optimism. It requires wage ladders, not slogans. It requires environments where skilled individuals can imagine a meaningful future. Cities that hold onto their young do so by building institutions and industries that demand local talent — and reward it. A region that cannot retain or produce talent becomes dependent on population inflows that stabilize numbers but not capacity.
The fourth lever is narrative reconstruction. A city’s self-understanding cannot be superficial; it is meant to be an organizing force. Right now, Hickory’s narrative is shaped by affordability and nostalgia — two stories that do not inspire ambition. A reconstructed narrative would not rely on boosterism or false optimism. It would present Hickory as a place rebuilding purpose, reclaiming dignity, and redefining its role in the region. This narrative has to be earned through action, not invented through marketing. But no structural change takes root without a narrative that binds the community to a shared direction.
The fifth lever is regional alignment. Hickory cannot gain leverage in isolation. The state’s economic power is consolidating into four anchor metros — Charlotte, Raleigh, Asheville, and Wilmington. Hickory’s strategic future depends on linking itself to these power centers through transportation corridors, workforce pipelines, industry alliances, and higher-education partnerships. Mid-sized cities that refuse regional alignment become invisible. Those that build alliances regain influence.
The sixth lever — the one that makes all others possible — is political will. Not the ceremonial type, but the structural kind: the willingness to abandon failing models, confront uncomfortable truths, prioritize long-term capacity over short-term calm, and make decisions that benefit the next generation more than the next quarter. Without political will, the other levers become decorative. With it, they become transformative.
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Segment VI — Vision 2040 – A Leveraged Hickory
By 2040 Hickory has done what Greenville, SC and Chattanooga, TN did a generation earlier: it built an anchor and specialized ruthlessly.
The decisive move came in 2029 when the UNC Board of Governors approved the Western North Carolina Engineering Hub — a full co-partnership between NC State University and Appalachian State University. What started as a modest 2+2 pilot in mechatronics and advanced materials rapidly scaled into a 180-acre applied-engineering district on assembled land along the I-40 corridor. Fueled by state, ARC, and Tier-1 industry commitments, the Hub now graduates 450–550 credentialed engineers and technicians each year, 70% of whom stay in the region because local wages for those skill sets range from $78k–$145k (2025$).
Median household income has climbed from $63k in 2023 to $109k in constant (2025$) dollars — no longer lagging the state or national averages, but running roughly in line with or slightly ahead of both. A decent three-bedroom home averages $378,000 (2025$), yet the mortgage-to-income ratio for a dual-earner Hub family is lower than it was in 2023 because wages rose faster than real estate.
The public schools rank in the top quintile of North Carolina districts by growth metrics and no longer function as social-service centers of last resort. Net migration of 25–34-year-olds turned positive in 2032 and has stayed there. Downtown is walkable, lively, and mixed-income — not because of lifestyle branding but because people under 40 can now buy or rent there and still build wealth.
Hickory never became a metropolis. It became necessary again — a small city that quietly out-earns most of its peers because it finally chose capacity over affordability.
Hickory’s moment of decision is not coming. It is here.
My Own Time Ω
Some people say I’m a complainer—that I’m always pointing to the bad and ignoring the good. I’ve heard that for most of my life. It’s the default accusation people reach for when they don’t want to face what’s right in front of them. I reject it outright. What I do on here isn’t complaining. It’s awareness. It’s pattern recognition. It’s survival thinking. I’ve had to live that way since childhood, and those instincts did not come from luxury. They came from loss, instability, and being forced to read the room long before most kids knew what a “room” even was.
I’ve never laid every detail of my life bare on this platform, but I’ve left the breadcrumbs. Anyone paying attention knows the person behind these posts is not some online crank yelling at clouds. You know pieces of my education. You know some of my professional history. You know stories of the kitchens I’ve worked in, the pressure I’ve endured, and the expectations I’ve met and exceeded. I didn’t earn those stripes by pretending problems don’t exist. I earned them by seeing what others miss and reacting before moments of inflection.
That same instinct is what built The Hickory Hound. Years before people started talking about “decline,” I was documenting wage stagnation, the thinning of the middle class, the rise of survival budgeting, the erosion of local ownership, and the quiet retreat of civic responsibility. I watched this city drift from striving to settling—and every time I pointed to the why, someone accused me of being negative. But the work wasn’t negativity. It was diagnosis. It was documenting cause and effect in real time.
This week’s release of The Stolen Recovery (on The Hound’s Signal on Substack) is a perfect example. People can spin whatever political narrative they want, but the facts are simple: Hickory is living inside a recovery that stabilized institutions (Banks, Financiers, Real Estate) and drained households. We have high rents without high incomes, expensive training without job guarantees, wage floors that don’t match the cost of life, and debt loads people can’t climb out of. Government calls it “growth.” Residents call it “exhaustion.” Those are not the same thing.
Every major article I’ve written this year ties into that theme. Structural Schisms: The Vanishing Middle showed how the mid-tier of this economy is falling out from under us. Hickory 101: Hickory as Legacy City addressed how the city has forgotten the generational handoff that once made it strong. The Hound’s Method explained why you need structured analysis—not cheerleading—to understand what’s coming. Reading the Room and From the Kitchen to the Command Post showed how the disciplines I learned under extreme pressure translate into civic intelligence work.
Even the “Dear Rachel: Life Is Wonderful” episode showed the exact divide I keep writing about — one resident who feels life is full of opportunity, and a community full of people who are barely hanging on. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was a demonstration of how two realities can exist in the same town.
People who call me a complainer never seem to ask themselves the obvious question:
If everything were fine, why does my analysis keep proving right?
So many trends I warned about years ago are now sitting in the middle of daily life. We’re not dealing with imaginary problems. We’re dealing with a city where the economic floor keeps shrinking, where so many working class folks survive on margins that keep eroding, where local government has been trained to postpone instead of fix, and where the energy that once defined Hickory is being siphoned off by delay and stagnation.
But here’s the deeper truth:
I don’t do this work because I dislike Hickory.
I do it because I refuse to give up on this place.
I want better for this place because I wanted better for myself. Because I was raised with Depression-era values from people who survived real hardship. Because I know what a functioning community looks like, and I’ve watched ours drift too far into resignation. Because I’ve lived the consequences of instability and I recognize the same patterns playing out across this region.
If I’m sharp in my tone, it’s because the stakes are real.
If I’m direct, it’s because time is short.
If I point to problems, it’s because Hickory has spent decades avoiding them.
My work is not about pessimism. It’s about clarity. It’s about building a shared vocabulary so people can finally talk honestly about what they are living through. And it’s about understanding that you cannot repair what you refuse to name.
People think I’m hard on Hickory. Truth is, I believe in Hickory more than they do. I believe it can still rebuild—but only if we stop pretending everything is fine.
This platform was built for that purpose.
To tell the truth.
To track the patterns.
To leave a record.
And to insist that we deserve more than the quiet decline we’ve been sold.
That’s not complaining.
That’s responsibility.
🥠Fortune Cookie Reading
“The path you walk becomes clearer when you stop hoping for easy answers and start preparing for the real ones.”
🈳Haiku
Signals in the haze,
A city waiting to choose—
Future leans on truth.
