It wasn’t that long ago when people routinely talked about the death of urban America. Cities from New England through the Great Lakes region found themselves in what seemed like irreversible decline. First the jobs disappeared as industries shuttered factories, then the bottom dropped out of local economies and people started leaving. Nothing captured the distress of urban America more than when New York City went bankrupt in 1975.
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With economic and population loss came the social tragedies we summarized with the phrase “inner city” — drug abuse, crime, dysfunctional families, torn social fabric. Mostly, though, the collapse of those industrial cities brought poverty and the despair that comes with it.
That isn’t the way we talk about cities much anymore, but the description certainly fits a lot of rural America now: job losses, economic stagnation, the loss of social cohesion, drugs and despair. Poverty in over-abundance. Rural America has become the new inner city.
The figures are sobering. In 1980, urbanites had higher rates of cancer, teen pregnancy and divorce than people in the country. By 2014 those rates had flipped. Ditto, the rates of male work-force participation and those getting by on federal disability insurance – worse now in rural areas.
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No surprise, then, that the poorest areas of the nation are rural. That’s true in Ohio, too. One quarter of Ohio counties in metro regions had a child poverty rate of 25 percent or higher in 2015; but in half of all rural counties 25 percent or more of children live in poverty. And there are crushing demographics. People are leaving rural areas. Nationally, the rural population has declined for five consecutive years. That out-migration means rural America is also getting older faster than the rest of the nation as well. The median age in small towns is now 41, five years older than in metro regions. Even more shocking, the Census recorded in 2013 that in many sparsely populated areas deaths outpaced births for the first time.
There are many causes of this crisis, and while fixing it will be a huge challenge, the turn-around of American cities might provide one lesson. In a word: immigrants.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, before there were brewpubs and bike-lanes, before there were farmers markets and arts festivals in American cities, immigrants started arriving in struggling urban neighborhoods and helped to stabilize them. As a new book by my colleagues Tom Sugrue and Dominic Vitiello shows, immigration to American cities laid the foundation for the urban renaissance we see today.
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Unfortunately, many of these rural places desperately in need of an influx of new residents have cast their political lot with xenophobia and bigotry. Demonizing immigrants is not a smart way to attract them. And if these places don’t attract them, rural places are likely to continue the death spiral of economic decline and demographic collapse that they are in right now.
Cities remade themselves by welcoming newcomers a generation ago and are now reaping the rewards. Can rural America do the same?
Steven Conn teaches history at Miami University. His latest book is “Americans Against the City: Anti-urbanism in the 20th Century.”
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