New Carsey brief: "Is Rural America Failing or Succeeding? Maybe Both"

Dan Lichter and Kenneth Johnson summarize their latest article, from Demography, in this Carsey Institute brief.  

Commentators often lament the decline of rural America by contrasting the substantial population gains in urban areas to the modest gains in rural areas and the diminishing share of the population that lives there.1 The nonmetropolitan (rural) population peaked in 1940, when 75 million people, or 57 percent of all Americans, lived in small towns, in the open countryside, or on farms. Today, only 46 million people reside in nonmetropolitan areas, a record low 14 percent of the population. Many assume that a constant tide of the rural population has been flowing into cities, but the shift is not so simple. The spatial boundaries that separate rural and urban America are highly fluid.

This brief summarizes our peer reviewed article in Demography that provides cautionary lessons regarding the commonplace narrative of widespread rural decline and urban growth. It highlights the demographic fact that many counties simply “grow up” to become metropolitan. Each decade, many of the most successful nonmetropolitan counties—those with the greatest population and economic gains—are redefined as metropolitan. Today, 71 million people reside in the 753 counties that were once nonmetropolitan but since 1970 have been reclassified as metropolitan. With so many growing nonmetropolitan counties shifting to metropolitan status each decade due to urbanization, it is little wonder that rural population gains lag behind those in urban areas.