Rural US disappearing? Population share hits low

A coal truck dri­ves out of down­town Welch, W.Va. Rural places account for just 16 per­cent of the nation’s pop­u­la­tion, the low­est share ever, while metro areas are boom­ing into sprawl­ing mega­lopolises. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Jon C. Hancock)

HOPE YEN

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Rural Amer­ica now accounts for just 16 per­cent of the nation’s pop­u­la­tion, the low­est ever.

The lat­est 2010 cen­sus num­bers hint at an emerg­ing Amer­ica where, by mid­cen­tury, city bound­aries become indis­tinct and rural areas grow ever less rel­e­vant. Many com­mu­ni­ties could shrink to vir­tual ghost towns as they shut­ter busi­nesses and close down schools, demog­ra­phers say.

More metro areas are boom­ing into sprawl­ing mega­lopolises. Bar­ring fresh invest­ment that could bring jobs, how­ever, large swaths of the Great Plains and Appalachia, along with parts of Arkansas, Mis­sis­sippi and north Texas, could face sig­nif­i­cant pop­u­la­tion declines.

These places posted some of the biggest losses over the past decade as young adults left and the peo­ple who stayed got older, mov­ing past child­bear­ing years.

“This place ain’t dead yet, but it’s got about half a foot in the grave,” said Bob Frees, 61, of Moundsville, W.Va., which now has a pop­u­la­tion of just over 9,000. “The big-money jobs are all gone. We used to have the big mills and the rolling plants and stuff like that, and you could walk out of high school when you were 16 or 17 and get a $15-an-hour job.”

Demog­ra­phers put it a bit more formally.

“Some of the most iso­lated rural areas face a major uphill bat­tle, with a broad area of the coun­try emp­ty­ing out,” said Mark Mather, asso­ciate vice pres­i­dent of the Pop­u­la­tion Ref­er­ence Bureau, a research group in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. “Many rural areas can’t attract work­ers because there aren’t any jobs, and busi­nesses won’t relo­cate there because there aren’t enough qual­i­fied work­ers. So they are caught in a down­ward spiral.”

Rural towns are scram­bling to attract new res­i­dents and stave off heavy fund­ing cuts from finan­cially strapped fed­eral and state governments.

Delta Air Lines recently announced it would end flight ser­vice to 24 small air­ports, sev­eral of them in the Great Plains, and the U.S. Postal Ser­vice is mulling plans to close thou­sands of branches in mostly rural areas of the coun­try. The Uni­ver­sity of Kansas this month opened a new med­ical school with a class of eight in Salina, a regional hub of nearly 50,000 peo­ple, in hopes of sup­port­ing nearby rural com­mu­ni­ties that have no doc­tors at all.

In North Dakota, col­leges are seek­ing to draw in young adults by charg­ing low tuition and fees. It’s part of a broader trend in which many slow-growing rural states are tout­ing recre­ational scenic land­scapes or extend­ing tuition breaks to out-of-state res­i­dents who typ­i­cally are charged more.

Many rural areas, the Great Plains in par­tic­u­lar, have been steadily los­ing pop­u­la­tion since the 1930s with few signs of the trend slow­ing in com­ing decades, accord­ing to cen­sus figures.

The share of peo­ple in rural areas over the past decade fell to 16 per­cent, pass­ing the pre­vi­ous low of 20 per­cent in 2000. The rural share is expected to drop fur­ther as the U.S. pop­u­la­tion bal­loons from 309 mil­lion to 400 mil­lion by mid-century, lead­ing peo­ple to crowd cities and sub­urbs and fill in the open spaces around them.

In 1910, the pop­u­la­tion share of rural Amer­ica was 72 per­cent. Such areas remained home to a major­ity of Amer­i­cans until 1950, amid post-World War II eco­nomic expan­sion and the baby boom.

Among the strug­gling rural areas are vast stretches of West Vir­ginia in Appalachia. Sev­eral of the state’s coun­ties over the past decade have lost large chunks of their pop­u­la­tion fol­low­ing the col­lapse of log­ging and coal-mining indus­tries dur­ing the 1960s.

In Moundsville, Frees describes his town, which sits in the north­ern pan­han­dle along the edge of Penn­syl­va­nia near Pitts­burgh, as appeal­ing in some regards because of its low cost of liv­ing and friendly atmos­phere in which “peo­ple talk to each other.” But oppor­tu­ni­ties are few for the area’s young adults other than per­haps the $7 or $8-an-hour jobs at the nearby Wal-Mart store.

“The young kids today are flee­ing the area,” Frees said. “They get the edu­ca­tion and then they leave because there’s noth­ing here for them.”

Other rural U.S. coun­ties suf­fer­ing big declines include Issaquena, Jef­fer­son and Sharkey in Mis­sis­sippi; Sheri­dan and Towner in North Dakota; Kiowa in Kansas; Cimar­ron in Okla­homa; Ten­sas Parish in Louisiana; Mon­roe in Arkansas and Cot­tle, King and Cul­ber­son in Texas. All had per­cent­age losses of 20 per­cent or more over the past decade.

The num­bers are based partly on an analy­sis by the Pop­u­la­tion Ref­er­ence Bureau. The data were sup­ple­mented with cal­cu­la­tions by Robert Lang, a soci­ol­ogy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Nevada-Las Vegas, and William H. Frey, a demog­ra­pher at the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion. “Rural” is gen­er­ally defined as non­metro areas with fewer than 50,000 people.

While rural Amer­ica shrinks, larger U.S. met­ro­pol­i­tan areas have enjoyed double-digit per­cent­age gains in pop­u­la­tion over the past sev­eral decades. Since 2000, met­ros grew over­all by 11 per­cent with the biggest gains in sub­urbs or small– or medium-sized cities. In fact, of the 10 fastest-growing places, all were small cities incor­po­rated into the sub­urbs of expand­ing metro areas, mostly in Cal­i­for­nia, Ari­zona and Texas.

In all, the share of Amer­i­cans liv­ing in sub­urbs has climbed to an all-time high of 51 per­cent. Despite sharp declines in big cities in the North­east and Mid­west since 2000 due to the reces­sion, U.S. cities increased their share by 3 per­cent­age points to 33 percent.

“These new pat­terns sug­gest that there will be a blur­ring of bound­aries as regions expand well beyond offi­cial government-defined def­i­n­i­tions,” Frey said. “Peo­ple like to ‘have it all’ — afford­able hous­ing in a smaller-town set­ting but in close prox­im­ity to jobs and big-city ameni­ties such as spe­cial­ized shop­ping, cul­tural events and major sports and enter­tain­ment venues.”

“Many moderate-sized metro areas can ful­fill all of these needs,” he said.

The Cen­sus Bureau will soon begin to define new “com­bined sta­tis­ti­cal areas” — often referred to by demog­ra­phers as megapoli­tan areas or mega­lopolises — based on growth and over­lap­ping com­muter traf­fic. Some ana­lysts point to a merger of areas between Austin and San Anto­nio, between Tampa and Orlando and pos­si­bly between Phoenix and Tuc­son, with the Washington-Baltimore region extend­ing south­ward to Rich­mond, Va.

These new mega­lopolises could help spur cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment invest­ment in major cities and the grow­ing small towns in between.

“There’s such a large share of pop­u­la­tion that is now in reach of a sub­stan­tial met­ro­pol­i­tan cen­ter due to tran­sit sys­tems and high­ways, that the tra­di­tional notion of small-town Amer­ica is chang­ing,” said Lang, who has done exten­sive research on U.S. megapoli­tan and regional growth.

“Fewer and fewer peo­ple live in the deeply rural places, and for most peo­ple in smaller towns, a big regional hos­pi­tal or a Wal-Mart or strip mall is not too far away,” he said.

He and other demog­ra­phers believe that rural areas will remain viable, although many will be swal­lowed up by boom­ing met­ro­pol­i­tan areas and linked into sprawl­ing mega­lopolises. Far-flung rural coun­ties boast­ing vaca­tion and out­door recre­ation also will con­tinue as pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tion points for young cou­ples, retirees and empty nesters.

Lang said he hoped the grow­ing con­ver­gence of major metro areas — and smaller towns in between — will pro­mote bet­ter regional plan­ning and coop­er­a­tion rather than lead­ing to indi­vid­ual cities act­ing as rivals for new invest­ment. He said such col­lab­o­ra­tion might mean devel­op­ment of more roads or regional high-speed rail, or new approaches to water and energy con­ser­va­tion in the Moun­tain West.

Posted by AP News on Jul 27 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.