Nationally, 71% of all metropolitan counties grew between 2008 and 2017, but more than half of the remaining micropolitan and rural counties did not grow or shrank in population.Regional outcomes were also sharply divergent. When a rural county grows, it transmutes into an urban one.In a way, rural areas serve as urban America’s farm team: All their most promising prospects get called up to the big leagues, leaving the low-density margins populated by an ever-shrinking pool of those who couldn’t qualify.Imagine how unfair a sport would seem if one team automatically drafted the other’s best players the moment they showed any promise. But because they grew, they no longer count as rural America in the official statistics.
This is true Scholars and analysts have varying explanations for these outcomes. He is also an employee of Iowa State University, a Land Grant institution, and directly funded by the USDA and the state of Iowa to study regional economies. The last presidential election showed that rural America is very different than urban America. Most notably, in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won only the counties defined as urban when the metropolitan classification began in 1950, while Donald Trump would have won every group of counties added to metropolitan after the initial round, as Stephan Goetz (Pennsylvania State University), Mark Partridge (Ohio State University) and Heather Stephens (West Virginia University) showed in their review of rural America at the dawn of the Trump era, “What might be described as rural culture and values will have faded some, but they’re more alive in places that have recently urbanized than in places that have been more highly urbanized for longer,” said University of California at Davis legal scholar Lisa Pruitt.About 6 in 10 U.S. adults who consider themselves “rural” live in an area classified as metropolitan by standards similar to those used above, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted in 2017. According to the United States’ original 1950 urban classifications, rural America is crushing it. Culturally, newly urban areas often have more in common with persistently rural places than with the biggest cities. And 3 in 4 of the adults who say they live in a “small town”? The West and the South combined had 72% and 82% of the job and population gains, respectively, while the Northeast and the Midwest split the remainder.Economic and population declines among micropolitan and rural areas were especially strong in the Northeast and the Midwest. Not so shocking, however, is that few policymakers are even talking about rural America’s dramatic decline. The story is markedly different in the nation’s largest urban communities.I’m writing from Iowa, where every four years presidential hopefuls swoop in to test how voters might respond to their various ideas for fixing the country’s problems. It is important to develop policies that assure access to necessary public services, connect rural residents to Academics are good at isolating the causes and the consequences of rural decline, but we have yet to figure out David Swenson has received funding from the USDA and several state agencies in the past for his analysis and research. Metropolitan areas consist of those counties with central cities of at least 50,000, along with the surrounding counties that are economically dependent on them. Rural decline is not that the rural area is shrinking. The hidden psychology of pandemics across time and contextsAdvanced Biobased Materials and Composites Conference They make up 36% of all counties. We’re starting nonprofit groups left and right.”If rural Americans complain of being left behind, it might be because they literally are. But because many residents commute to a central city, they’re considered part of that metro area.A few years after every census, counties like Bracken are reclassified, and rural or “nonmetropolitan” America shrinks and metropolitan America grows. Geographically, a large fraction of the nation is struggling to simply maintain the status quo. In the Midwest, 61% of the micropolitans contracted, as did 81% of the rural counties. But they were a major part of the demographic, social and cultural landscape. But that can’t be the only way to define rural,” he added.The nation has long fretted about the fate of its rural margins, but after the 2016 election the discussion took on a different tenor.“Rural women — like rural and white working-class folks more generally — have become downright toxic in my world, the world of progressive elites,” Pruitt Policymakers’ disdain for rural people has prevented them from seeing and solving the challenges rural Americans face, Pruitt said.“At one time,” she said, “farm life or rural living was seen as integral to the American narrative, but that’s hardly the case any longer.”The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. Most of the nation’s smaller urban and rural counties are not growing and will not grow. Statistics such as these affect everything from Medicare reimbursement to the larger perception that the nation’s breadbasket is also a basket case.“Yes, rural communities have problems,” Winchester said. That’s essentially what happens when we measure rural areas as whatever’s left over after anywhere that hits a certain population level is considered metropolitan. Yes, there are many struggling metropolitan regions, but there are many more midsized and rural counties wrestling with decline.Bringing it back home, 69 of Iowa’s 99 counties have contracted There is, in short, a regional ripple effect. Because Lincoln county has struggled, it’s still counted as rural.Ben Winchester, longtime rural specialist at the University of Minnesota Extension, bristles at the suggestion that rural America’s fate is sealed. It skews our view of everything from presidential politics to suicide to deaths caused by alcohol.Officially, the years since 2010 have marked a turning point for rural counties.
Associate Scientist of Economics, Iowa State University “We hear about them all the time. Their share of the U.S. population hit an all-time low of 14 percentAny attempt to make a clean break between urban and rural will look arbitrary, as Kentucky lawyer Amanda Kool “There are places on the outer edge of big metropolitan areas where you’d swear you were in a rural area,” Johnson said.