Rural population in decline in parts of US

 Teresa Mull:

A new report finds that for the first time since these things have been kept track of, rural America’s population has shrunk. This trend is a shame for all Americans (except for a few of us who inhabit rural America and enjoy the solitude).

The University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy findings are based on Census data from April 2010-April 2020, pre-dating the Covid outbreak and its dubious effects on people’s migratory habits (a Pew Research survey suggests that reports of a mass urban exodus during the height of the pandemic were overblown). Kenneth Johnson, the sociology professor who conducted the study, reports that population loss “was widespread across rural America, with more than two-thirds of all nonmetropolitan counties losing population” during this period.

“The loss was minimal,” Johnson notes — “just 289,000 (-0.6 percent) out of 46 million, but it is the first decade-long rural population loss in history.”

The continued abandonment of rural America is disturbing for several reasons. Johnson cites “economic turbulence beginning with the Great Recession of 2007 and continuing through the next decade” as having a “significant demographic impact on rural America.”
...

This appears to be the case in some small communities throughout the US.  However, as a Rural Texan, I am not seeing in Southeast Texas.  On the rural road, I am living on people are building new homes on several acre lots that were formerly pastures.  I live between two small Texas towns that are also growing with industry and new homes.  Small towns north of Houston are some of the fastest-growing urban areas in the country.  I think the same is true for North Texas and around Austin.  It is probably less true in the panhandle.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more