Art Cullen turns his attention to rural poverty

This is from Cullen's Substack today, "Iowa's unique sort of rural poverty."  Cullen recently traveled to New Orleans and back from northern Iowa (and he did so in an electric Ford pick up truck, no less).  Here's a rumination that begins as he passed from northeast Arkansas into southeast Missouri.  

Coming from relatively prosperous Iowa, I continue to be stunned by the scenes of grinding rural poverty when you get off the freeways and revisit Hwy. 61 or its cousins.

Drive the edge of gorgeous Mark Twain National Forest enroute from Jonesboro, Ark., to the Gateway to the Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, Mo., where the downtown is dead empty on a Saturday afternoon but for an open sports bar with no customers. A sign on the bar proclaims it is doing what it can to save the downtown.

The action is out on the highway in a town of 16,000 whose population steadily declined since 1980, set in the prettiest hills you could behold.

Shacks line the road in Arkansas, Black and White folks. You see the same in South Dakota off Interstate 90 (substitute Native American for Black), or in eastern Colorado, or in a Kansas cowtown time and progress passed by.

You get back to Iowa where the farmsteads look better, the dirt blacker, the machinery shinier. Yet the rust sets in here, too.

Nationally, the rural poverty rate is about 15% compared to an urban rate of about 11%. Those statistics do not reflect the extremes you see in the little burgs waylaid by the freeways.

Cullen goes on to offer further comparisons of that Arkansas/Missouri area to northwest Iowa, where he lives,  The entire post is well worth a read, not least for its discussion of the significance of immigration and race--and, of course, what freeways have done to downtowns, including those like Poplar Bluff.