Deep dive into rural disadvantage in Virginia

The University of Richmond Law Review symposium on rural legal issues has been published and it includes this deep dive into rural Virginia by Prof. Andrew Block of the University of Virginia and Antonella Nicholas, who will soon be a graduate of that law school.  The title is "Those Who Need the Most Get the Least:  The Challenges of, and Opportunity for Helping Rural Virginia."  Part of the article's introduction follows:  

Rural America, as has been well documented, faces many challenges. Businesses and people are migrating to more urban and suburban regions. The extraction and agricultural economies that once helped them thrive—mining, tobacco, textiles—are dying. And, as we discuss below, residents of rural communities tend to be older, poorer, less credentialed in terms of their education, less healthy, and declining in population.

On a regular basis, political leaders on both sides of the aisle, and on national and state levels, make commitments to rural areas to help improve the quality of life for residents, to listen, and to help. Even with all the attention, many challenges remain, leading policy makers to ask: How can we help our rural communities?

In this Article we try to answer that question by looking specifically at the Commonwealth of Virginia, a state whose rural residents suffer disproportionately worse life outcomes than their counterparts in other parts of the state. While it is true, as we will show, that state leaders have paid attention to these challenges, it is equally true that many of the challenges facing rural Virginians persist.

It is important to note two things at the outset. First, rather than being comprehensive, this Article is intended to be illustrative—both of the challenges and of the solutions for rural Virginia. Therefore, we, by necessity, made some choices about which topics to cover and which to exclude, however important they might be.

Likewise, even with the topics we chose to examine, we could not delve into every challenge and solution within each topic. Hopefully, however, by presenting the issues as we have, and offering up some policy recommendations for each, we have demonstrated the wide range of issues and challenges, and the wide range of intervention and support necessary to help our rural residents.

Second, and importantly, by examining demographic data, and detailing some of the struggles that many in rural Virginia face, we do not intend, at all, to denigrate or question the benefits of rural living, the strength of communities in many parts of rural Virginia, or the individual choices made by people who live there. We are simply trying to use the data, and illustrate the challenges, to make the case that policymakers need to do more to help rural Virginians lead the kind of lives they deserve to lead.

Our Article proceeds as follows. We first say a quick word about definitions, and what “rural” means. We then lay out demographic information about rural Virginians to illustrate some of the key challenges to serving rural communities, and to demonstrate the overlapping and related nature of the challenges facing many rural residents. We also spend time on demographic information to show that the rural population in Virginia is much more racially diverse than is commonly perceived. This racial diversity, we contend, is also critical for policymakers to understand as they craft solutions to the challenges facing rural Virginians. It is critical to under- stand because the problems in certain regions may have different causes and historical antecedents, and perhaps may require more creative policy solutions, than the same problems in other rural regions. Likewise, making clear that rural populations are not, as popularly conceived, a white, conservative monolith, may also make it more possible for a bipartisan and geographically diverse group of legislators to come together to address these challenges.

After discussing demographics, we make recommendations in various policy areas that align with the needs of rural residents as outlined in the demographics Section. For each area, we explain the problem, some of the work done to address that problem to date, and the areas where we need to devote more time and re- sources.

With this overview, our hope is that this Article might be of value to current and future Virginia policymakers and even to policymakers in other states attempting to grapple with these persistent challenges. Indeed, part of the point of the synthesis is to demonstrate that there are issues endemic to rural life—lack of employment options, broadband access, transportation gaps, low tax bases, and an aging population—that are not as present in urban communities. In this way, rural issues are both unique and profoundly interconnected with one another. Unless and until policy makers engage in a cross-cutting comprehensive approach to the challenges and problems that rural communities face, they will persist.

In addition to exploring a range of challenges and potential problems, and to address the connectivity problem, we conclude by offering some policy recommendations. Chief among these is that Virginia create a high-level cabinet position with interagency authority to oversee rural affairs and development.

An interesting feature of the article is an appendix listing two years of business openings in rural Virginia. 

Here is the link to the entire symposium, which includes my article (with Kaceylee Klein), "Rural Bashing."