Is Rural America Failing or Succeeding? Maybe Both

For urbanizing rural areas, the demographic future looks bright, according to authors Kenneth Johnson and Daniel Lichter, of The Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of NH. They summarize their peer reviewed article in Demography that provides cautionary lessons regarding the commonplace narrative of widespread rural decline and urban growth.

Johnson and Lichter report that since 1970, 25 percent of counties containing 22 percent of the current U.S. population have been reclassified from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan status because of population and economic growth.

All of the growth in the share of the population that lives in metropolitan counties is due to nonmetropolitan counties transforming into metropolitan counties.

This transfer of population and territory through reclassification calls into question the commonplace narrative of urban growth and rural decline occurring through an emptying out of rural America.

The authors conclude that for urbanizing rural areas, the demographic future looks bright. They are much less sanguine about the many remote, thinly populated, and declining areas “left behind” in rural America, where the prospects for future population gain and development seem more limited than ever. Read the brief.