Academic Work
Dan has completed two bachelor's degrees in Sociology and Urban Planning and a master’s in professional studies in Community Development. Academic Research, both published and unpublished, can be found below.
The Life and Death of Cairo Illinois: A Community Development Case Study
"It was dying slow, and it was dying mean…dying of every disease, human and economic and elemental, that could be conjured and called down upon a town. Its capacity to cling to a kind of life did nothing to ennoble Cairo but only reinforced its sinister aura. The town’s sulfurous legacy of corruption, wretched luck, and murderous temperament made it seem cursed, a locus of evil.”
– Ron Powers, Far From Home 1991 (p. 4)
Over the past two decades, nationally respected journalists and bloggers have made an almost annual trek to Cairo, snapping photos and making videos that would make their way to YouTube and TikTok. Articles in newspapers, magazines, and travel journals take quick potshots at the overall state of Cairo’s decay, ranging from the dead and dying to the hopeless and helpless (Siegler, 2018). Many quips that Cairo is not dissimilar to other rust belt and rural communities, which have all seen a mass exodus of economic productivity and wealth as companies relocate to global cities afar for cheaper taxes and non-unionized labor (Kuppinger, 2005). Others stoke fear in the growing concern of climate change and proclaim that nearby geographic and transportation assets are the impetus for the town's demise (Gauen, 2011; Goldenberg, 2011; Murphy, 2022; O'Connell, 2019; Shaw & Song, 2018; Song, 2018). Yet another contingent blames Cairo’s decline on its storied racial past, with de facto and de jure segregation (Ewing & Roddy, 1996; Good, 1973; Hinton, 2021; Pimblott, 2019; Rothstein, 2018). While each report provides a crucial analysis of the current situation, a more detailed look will challenge the monocausal explanations for Cairo’s decline and show that the collapse results from a collection of failures when linked together.
The setting for this case study is the City of Cairo, a small rural community located at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers; the two largest in North America are located at the southernmost tip of Illinois. Once the tenth-largest city in the state of Illinois ("1870 Overview - History - U.S. Census Bureau", 2022), reaching a peak population of 15,203 in 1920 ("1920 Overview - History - U.S. Census Bureau, 2022); Cairo has experienced massive, continuous population loss since the middle of the 20th century. As of the 2020 census, the city has a population of 1,733, which makes it 538th in the state (U.S. Census Bureau).