Rural counties see population losses the size of small towns, even as minority groups grew
Tom Martin remembers the clothing and jewelry stores, bakeries and pharmacies, restaurants and sundry shops that once lined the streets of Mt. Pulaski in Logan County, Illinois.
The uptown area of this central Illinois hilltop town was the center of a thriving rural community when Martin was growing up in the 1960’s. But then people left.
From nearly 34,000 people in 1960, Logan County now is home to fewer than 28,000, according to the 2020 Census. Mt. Pulaski's only grocery store closed in 2016.
While America’s cities and suburbs grew over the last decade, its rural areas continued a multi-decade trend of population losses, census data released this month show.
The new data paint a more diverse picture of the country's rural communities and punctuate the vulnerability where the urban-rural divide is growing. The U.S. Census Bureau has warned that comparing race data between the 2020 and 2010 census "should be made with caution" because of changes in the way it asked questions and later analyzed the data in the latest decennial count.
Ramifications from the shift don't stop at America's rural borders. They will be felt in state capitols and in Washington, D.C., as states use the data to draw new state legislative and congressional boundaries.
In the jigsaw puzzle of America, rural counties account for the majority of the 3,143 pieces. But the 46 million people who live in those places represent only about 13.7% of the U.S. population.
And it’s getting smaller.
Two-thirds of America’s rural counties lost population between 2010 and 2020, a USA TODAY analysis of census data released last month shows. Of the one-third that grew, most were buoyed by a faster-growing minority population.
The 2,300 people Logan County lost over the last decade is more than the number who still call Mt. Pulaski home. And Logan County isn't the only place that lost as many people as the population of entire towns.
“A lot of the amenities are not there, when you lose your grocery store and you don’t have daycare and you’ve lost all those things that used to be very locally based and run by people you knew,” said Martin, who returned in the early 1980s to join the family farming business. “You had families that were long-term business people. Now people travel outside the community.”
Rural America is shrinking
The urban-rural population divide is a fissure growing wider each decade.
National population growth was at its most sluggish since the Great Depression between 2010 and 2020, weighed down by population loss in smaller counties. While most rural counties shrank over the last decade,more than 81% of large suburban counties increased population, and 91% of large urban counties grew.
USA TODAY used a classification system from the National Center for Health Statistics, reworked into smaller groups by the Pew Research Center, to determine which of the more than 3,000 U.S. counties were considered rural.
Rural counties lost about 288,000 people from 2010 to 2020, a decrease of about 6.2%, the USA TODAY analysis shows. Smaller metropolitan counties gained about 6.6 million people, up 7.1% for the decade.
The population divide between rural and urban counties is greatest in the large urban and suburban counties that were the biggest drivers of population growth in the 2020 census.
Large urban counties were the biggest gainers: 8.5 million more people live there, about 9.1% more than in 2010. Large suburban counties added 7.9 million people, an increase of about 10.3%.
University of New Hampshire professor Kenneth M. Johnson said it can be difficult to pinpoint why people are leaving rural areas.
Two factors are clear, he said: Only about a third of rural counties had more people move to them than leave, and less than half had more births than deaths. Younger people are leaving rural areas before they have children, he said, accelerating the decline.
In Indiana, for example, more people were moving out than moving in for 30 years, but its population still grew because of the Baby Boom, said Matthew Kinghorn, senior demographic analyst with the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University.
More recent generations aren’t having enough children to balance out the migration losses, he said.
The loss of economic opportunity, as farming became more mechanized and manufacturing jobs moved overseas, has contributed to the loss of young people in rural America too, Johnson said.
“Once it starts it’s hard for it to stop. The only thing that can stop it is if there’s an influx of immigrants or people from other places,” he said.
Increasing diversity was the overwhelming factor driving growth in rural counties where USA TODAY found a population increase. More than 99% showed increases in diverse populations, while about 60% showed losses of white non-Hispanic people.
One factor that could be driving migration of people of color and Hispanic populations to some rural counties, Johnson said, is job opportunity. Farms that have grown beyond the manageable size for a family and other tentacles of the agriculture industry, such as food processing plants, need workers, he said.
A turkey processing plant and furniture manufacturers have been factors in the growing Latino population in Dubois County, Indiana, said Donna Balka, chairman of the Latino Collaboration Table.
Dubois County is one of the rare rural counties population grew over the last decade. In that time, its Hispanic white population increased by nearly 65%, the Census data show, and is the single largest minority group in the county.
The Latino Collaboration Table was formed in 2015, in part to try to address the shifting needs of the local population, Balka said. Some schools in the county, for example, have begun offering some resources translated in Spanish and offering bilingual study times at the local library.
"We've seen this coming," Balka said.
‘Plugging the holes on Main Street’
Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs Director Christopher Merrett calls rural population decreases a “wicked problem,” one so complicated that it’s hard to envision a solution. People leave rural areas for better jobs or because their town doesn’t have resources such as grocery stores or easy access to health care, and those institutions have fewer incentives to come to areas without a consistent customer base.
Officials in Mt. Pulaski talked to three grocery chains about opening a store in their town after a family-owned independent grocer closed in 2016, but Martin said they were told the town of less than 2,000 people was too small.
Working with the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs, Martin and others in Mt. Pulaski launched an idea for a community-owned grocery store. They raised $120,000 in about 60 days and in June 2020 opened the store, which sells local produce and meat among other products, in the heart of uptown Mt. Pulaski.
The institute is part of Western Illinois University and acts as a clearinghouse for information about rural issues and works with agencies on projects to improve rural life.
It was the second store the institute helped establish, opening a similar operation in Winchester, a city of fewer than 50,000 people in Scott County, Illinois. Merrett said those and other “community support enterprises” the institute advocates for are “plugging the holes on Main Street.”
The store sits among some empty storefronts, but Martin said it is part of a longer-term plan to revitalize the town center. A pub serving local beer has opened nearby, and investors are working on plans for street-level businesses topped by apartments.
Officials also are developing a daycare center, Martin said, with before and after-school care likely to start in the fall before a full-fledged center can open next year.
Lacking infrastructure for health care, education, highspeed Internet and other amenities all have contributed to rural population declines, said Veronica Nigh, senior economist at the Farm Bureau, a lobbying group that represents the agriculture industry.
“People want access to the best things no matter where they are. If that perpetually isn’t available in a rural place it makes it harder to stay,” she said.
The COVID-19 pandemic that forced people to work from home and schools to shift to remote classrooms also further exposed inequities in access to highspeed Internet in rural communities, she said.
More: Joe Biden wants to provide millions of Americans with high-speed internet. It won’t be easy.
Move here, get paid: Small towns offer up to $20K just to get you to live there, work remotely
In Athens, Ohio, broadband providers mostly run to homes on slowercopper wires instead of fiber optic cables, Mayor Steve Patterson said. The southeast Ohio county, home to Ohio University, has about 62,400 people now, down about 2,300 people over the decade, according to the census. But Patterson questioned whether city counts were depressed by the pandemic.
Patterson said he wants to attract new residents whose employers continue to allow remote work after being forced to adapt during the pandemic. He calls them "digital commuters."
He plans to use federal funding to extend fiber networking to city buildings, including an armory near the heart of uptown Athens that he wants to convert into a co-working space with highspeed Internet.
Patterson acknowledges that his city is insulated from some of the problems plaguing other rural communities. Health care facilities are attracted to the area by the prospect of working with Ohio University’s medical school. University-linked cultural programming and public services such as the courthouse attract people, who support business in the area.
Rural communities with reliable Internet, options to purchase food in town, good school districts and access to health care are in the best position to succeed, said Sean Park, a program manager at Western Illinois University who helped set up the grocery store in Mt. Pulaski.
“Those communities are the ones that are going to sustain themselves and the others, I think, will disappear,” Park said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Census shows rural America continues to shrink, but grow in diversity
