Four Rural Americas -- Place Matters

Leave it to the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute to do a new study that helps us understand the challenges of rural America.

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.

Some of our readers may ask why all this matters? Our answer to this very important question is that Carsey's "Place Matters" further proves that rural America isn't all alike, and that policy solutions will need to be flexable as we work to address rural America's unique challenges.