When many people hear the words “The American Dream”, the image of “Main Street” comes to mind: Small mom-and-pop shops line a road surrounded by crops and kids chase each other into candy stores. John Norris used to be a boy walking down the equivalent of Main Street in Red Oak, Iowa, a town with a population of under six thousand people. The former commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and departmental chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Agriculture now lives in Des Moines, Iowa and sends his children off to school from the biggest metro area in the state. Norris isn’t alone in leaving small-town America for life in the big city; across the nation, rural flight is occurring as more Americans are leaving behind the “simpler life” for the vibrancy and opportunity of the city.
Since 2010, 46 states have seen population loss in over 1,300 counties, the vast majority of them rural. Without thriving rural communities, the United States will see an increase in urban crowding and outsourcing of agriculture and manufacturing. The overall quality of life in these rural towns will continue to decrease without sustainable work, and citizens often have no choice but to stay there. Rural communities must make their towns more attractive to live in order to attract new residents and prevent old residents from fleeing to the city.
NO LONGER A HOMESTEAD: THE LOSS OF A FARM
The United States once found its rural lands occupied by family farms as generations upon generations took over the plots of land and continued their family tradition. Now, rural flight is occurring as agriculture is growing increasingly mechanized; with each technological advancement, less people are required to farm large expanses of land. Young people who would be the next generation to work on the farm are instead choosing to migrate from the rural communities to city centers in droves, causing the average age of a farmer in America to follow a 30-year steady increase. In rural New Hampshire, for instance, young people are increasingly feeling discouraged with the opportunities available in their communities. In 2008, 67 percent of young adults in Coos County, one of the most rural regions in New Hampshire, reported that “it is easy for people their age to find a job.” In 2011, only 19 percent felt this way. Youth that no longer find themselves working in the rural job sector, where sustainable jobs are constantly being stripped away, don’t find their communities sustainable places to work and live anymore.
A lack of adequate educational opportunities has also contributed to rural flight. Many rural communities do not have colleges nearby that their young people can attend, so students must leave to continue their education beyond high school. It has always been true that young people who leave for college often end up settling near their school instead of returning to their childhood homes, but the fact that students from all around the nation are attending at much higher rates than decades ago is only contributing to the growing populations fleeing.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
While it may seem inevitable and inconsequential that young people are leaving rural areas, this trend has widespread negative economic consequences. Many rural areas experience a weakened tax base due to rural flight. As a result, these communities cannot fund schools, infrastructure, healthcare, and other necessities. The aging rural population then suffers as it finds itself left with inadequate public services. The community’s suffering becomes cyclical since few of the young people who watch their community crumble as they grow up want to stay.
Although many believe that those having negative experiences in rural America should just move to a city, doing so often proves too difficult. Many people in rural communities are poor; rural Americans have consistently had higher poverty rates than urban Americans. Many people in small towns simply cannot afford to move to urban areas due to the rising costs of living in cities.
Furthermore, the migration of those who can afford to leave rural areas for a better life carries economic consequences for the rest of the nation. Constraints caused by urban crowding, such as unemployment and lack of solid infrastructure, can ultimately make the idealized “better life” in the big city much worse. As more people leave rural areas, less people will be available for agricultural work. As a result, the United States might eventually have so few of the farms that it needs to feed its people that it could find itself dependent on other countries for food. The nation would consequently have to increase its imports, therefore increasing its trade deficit and damaging its economy.
Rural flight will likely also harm the manufacturing industry. Although manufacturers are drawn to rural areas due to the lower taxes and land prices in these places, declining rural populations are depriving these companies of workers. Rural manufacturers might eventually be forced to follow their workers to the cities, in which case the current 79.5 percent of manufacturing that already occurs in urban areas will increase. The movement of rural manufacturers to cities would exacerbate the strains that urban areas already face due to the space and energy that manufacturing plants require. Without citizens being able to make a living working in agriculture and manufacturing in rural areas, the United States has the potential to lose much of the self-sustainability it has left.
STAYING RELEVANT
In small towns around the nation, immigrants are beginning to fill a vacancy left by those fleeing for the big city. Buena Vista County in Iowa, for example, is home to Storm Lake, which is the most diverse county in state. While Iowa is 91 percent white, white students attending Storm Lake schools comprise only 16 percent of the population.
While many small towns in rural Iowa are struggling, Storm Lake is not only growing — it is booming. In fact, the immigrant population is cited as keeping Storm Lake alive. “All of these manufacturing plants have been built-up and can’t find workers,” Norris told the HPR. “The only real opportunity for labor supply is the immigrant population. Without them the manufacturing plants will gravitate toward the urban centers.” Storm Lake embraces their immigrants; these are residents who are opening local businesses and contributing vitality to the community. As children are born and grow older, they stay in Storm Lake and create lives of their own.
Garden City, Kansas is similar to Storm Lake. Only 40 percent of the town identifies as “white, non-Hispanic,” compared to the just shy of 80 percent of Kansans who identify that way. Immigrants residing in Garden City open businesses and work in food production, keeping the local economy running successfully. In turn, local schools, infrastructure, and community life improve as well. In Diana R. Gordon’s book, Village for Immigrants, Hispanic immigrants, who comprise one third of the local population in Greenport, New York, are noted for reviving the local economy in a seasonal tourist town. Local residents that left their rural communities are finding their economic, cultural, and physical voids filled by faces from around the world.
All around the nation people are finding unique ways to retain, and sometimes increase, population in rural areas. One company is working to create mini tech hubs throughout rural America with the hopes that they will retain and attract young people. Pillar’s “Future Ready Iowa” was the brainchild of Linc Kroeger. Iowa-born, Kroeger moved away like most young people do and came back 20 years later to attempt to resurrect these small towns. “These aren’t remote software development jobs where people are working alone in their home office,” Kroeger told the HPR. “Technologists work in collaborative teams in a state-of-the-art technology innovation facility you’d expect to find in Silicon Valley.”
For a town like Jefferson, Iowa — which hasn’t seen a population this low since WWII — Kroeger hopes to do more than simply create job opportunities; he hopes to reform the way these communities operate. Jefferson passed a bond to open a community college that will teach the prerequisites required to join the new tech hub. This will provide young people right out of high school the skills they need to begin working in a highly desirable sector, and with an annual salary sitting high above the $43,333 average income in Jefferson, at $55,000 to $60,000. Kroeger said that Future Ready Iowa’s first rural “Forge” is set to open in Jefferson in May 2019.
Some research proposes creating walkable “city centers” in small towns in order to construct densely populated areas and mimic the convenience that comes with an urban area. Other towns will literally pay people to come live there. “In order to develop or recruit businesses, some remote rural towns have tried to compensate for the lack of advantages larger towns and urban areas have by providing ‘carrots’ such as subsidies or tax breaks,” Younjun Kim, assistant economics professor at Southern Connecticut University, explained to the HPR. Grant County, Indiana, for instance, gives new residents $5,000 toward a down-payment on a home. Marne, Iowa, on the other hand, gives new residents a free plot of land to build a house on. Kim warned that although these measures sometimes prove successful, local governments run the risk of paying for business activity that would have occurred in their towns anyway.
Future Revival
Ultimately, the only way citizens will be attracted to small towns is if the quality of life is attractive and sustainable. Although some people find community in rural towns that may be lost elsewhere, the growing demands of the U.S. economy will continue drawing people toward the higher salaries, and quality of life often deemed synonymous with urban living. Rural America will need to find innovative ways to remain relevant in a continually changing labor and educational world, or the U.S. economy will suffer. Without family farms and the vibrancy of “Main Street,” America runs the risk of losing what it prides itself on—being a land of opportunity. If there aren’t opportunities for people from all backgrounds in the 97 percent of land that is considered “rural,” citizens will all be crowded together looking for the same thing: a better future.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/NASA