It’s much smaller and has lost its midsize towns and the counties that surrounded bigger cities.The areas left after seven decades of reclassification tend to be defined by their history of clawing resources, such as copper, timber or winter wheat, from the open country, and their present of clawing a living from an older population and a shrinking economy.“Those kinds of areas have been losing population for a long time. Most of the nation’s smaller urban and rural counties are not growing and will not grow. There’s a lot of wide-open land there, but most people, and young people especially, live in the cities. It distorts how we see rural America.

You’re not going to see a lot of growth.”While there’s no easy answer for the definitional issues, we can be sure the narrative of “rural economic malaise and population decline” is an oversimplification, Lichter said. “It’s very hard to see how these places are going to recover,” he added.Such places include much of the Great Plains, Appalachia, the Even before the mine faltered, Lincoln County’s population growth slowed dramatically from 2010 to 2017, the most recent year for which we have data from the Census Bureau. 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. “We’ve got a diverse economy. At least on paper. What's changed is that a steady decline through the decades in natural population increase (births minus deaths) in rural America means that the natural increase is no longer big enough to … 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. Population decline in rural America is especially concentrated in the West. So why do headlines and statistics paint rural areas as perpetually in decline?Because the contest between rural and urban America is rigged. 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.
Contrast that with Wyoming’s two metro areas, Cheyenne and Casper, which added more people than the rest of the state combined.Both of Wyoming’s fast-growing metro areas were once defined as rural areas. In the Midwest, 61% of the micropolitans contracted, as did 81% of the rural counties. Culturally, newly urban areas often have more in common with persistently rural places than with the biggest cities. 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. 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. 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. This is true Scholars and analysts have varying explanations for these outcomes. By. It’s home to about as many people as urban America, and it’s growing faster. Inevitably, blight ensues. Even then, rural areas and small towns weren’t the “real America,” somehow morally superior to the rest of us. 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. To the Editor: Re “Getting Real About Rural America” (column, March 19):. Yes, there are many struggling metropolitan regions, but there are many more midsized and rural counties wrestling with decline. Associate Scientist of Economics, Iowa State University “We’re misrepresenting what’s really happening in rural areas.”Rural America today is a different place than in 1950. 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. We’ve got people moving in. Official definitions are regularly updated in such a way that rural counties are continually losing their most successful places to urbanization.


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