Rural areas facing economic and demographic headwinds do have potential successful strategies to pursue but there is no one particular “silver bullet,” experts agreed on a recent webinar hosted by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Rural areas in the United States have seen many changes over the last several years, including a post-pandemic population rebound after years of decline, a more rapidly aging population, increasing racial diversity, and a shift towards service-based economies,” said Hallie Lienhardt, Outreach and Communications Manager at IRP.
Dr. Amanda McMillan-Lecaw, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Drexel University, focused her remarks primarily on rural areas that have lost dominant employers while also dealing with ongoing depopulation as young people look for opportunities elsewhere.
She outlined three potential strategies to spur an economic rebound:
- Recruitment of large-scale employers and new industries.
- Leveraging rural landscapes and/or building up outdoor recreation industries to draw tourist or seasonal residents. She said some communities also have recently positioned large properties to attract land-hungry projects like solar farms or data center
- Finding creative ways to support existing small businesses and entrepreneurs, particularly in a post-COVID environment where many workers have much more flexibility to tele-work from more attractive, and potentially cheaper, surroundings.
“But there is no single silver bullet,” McMillan-Lecaw said. “Studies show that investing in quality of life as defined by the local residents is perhaps the most powerful draw for new migrants and a key means to build more resilient local businesses, In short, the most successful economic development paths for rural America tend to be those that reflect what people who live there think their rural place should be for.”
Dr. Jennifer Sherman, professor in the Department of Sociology at Washington State University, warned that while rural communities can benefit from an influx of more affluent residents, the phenomenon also presents the risk of gentrification and pricing local residents out of the housing market.
She said her research has found that gentrification, for poor residents, can mean “housing options were mostly limited, quite insecure . . . finding decent housing hinged for people on a combination of financial but also social resources.”
Sherman said the dilemma for many low-income residents in rural communities with limited housing was that they didn’t just need sufficient financial resources but needed connections to and positive reputations with local landlords.
Residents need “financial capital, but also the social capital, and what I call moral capital, this sort of capital based on reputation,” Sherman said. “Particularly amongst the very poor, resources are often already stretched quite thin and complicated relationships and hard lives can diminish the help that social networks are willing and able to offer.”
Dr. Jamon Flowers, Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Georgia, emphasized the positive roles rural schools can play,
“Rural schools are not broken," Flowers said. "There are great quality educators out there that's doing the work. And they're doing the work with less than their counterparts in urban education, but also they are making more significant growth and more significant changes than some of their counterparts in urban education.”