The report -- "Place Matters: Challenges and Opportunities in Four Rural Americas" -- identifies four separate and very different places in rural America.
- Amenity-rich areas with seashores, mountains, forests and lakes, enjoyed by vacationers, retirees and 2nd home owners.
- Declining resource-dependent areas -- regions that once prospered because of agriculture or mining, timber or manufacturing, now without enough opportunity to maintain a middle class.
- Chronically poor regions which have lacked investment and lost jobs for decades.
- Transitional, defined as regions that seem to be balancing resource-based decline but still have amenity growth.
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The four types of rural communities clearly points to the diversity among rural areas across the country. Yet they all have some things in common. One is the skewed population profile. Even today more older people are moving into rural communitees; young adults are again leaving.
At the same time we are seeing almost universally in rural America increased stress on social infrastructure - the things that make a community work. I am talking not only about the typical notions of infrastructure, like roads and such. I also mean medical facilities, schools and projects and policies that protect the community against becoming a less satisfying place to live.
The increase in the older population may be the most obvious strain on medical services but child poverty is just as big a problem - and may pose the greatest long term implications for rural communities.
In those communities that are near urban populations - near enough for colonization - in migration can put a strain on the demand for public services that local governments simply cannot afford - even while they drive property prices higher.
In most instances all of these problems are matters that can be affected by public policy. At the national level - and even at the state level - problems faced by rural communities are usually seen as too remote, too difficult, or just too unimportant to address. Many of rural America's most pressing problem are actually handled by local county governments - bodies which should be more easily made to focus on these problems.
I think that the most pressing need of Rural America is the development of stronger public policy consciousness and more political activism. Politics is, after all, the process of setting public policy. If there is a grater need in rural America, no matter what the neature of the community, I don't know what it is.
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