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A Statistical Tweak Can’t Solve Rural America’s Problems

A Statistical Tweak Can’t Solve Rural America’s Problems

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When a lot of people move to a rural area, it stops being a rural area. This undeniable truth was trotted out by the Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam last week as evidence that, hey, things aren’t going as badly for rural America as the statistics say. The article got enough attention that it seems like a brief explanation is in order. Yes, any long-run accounting of urban versus rural population change is going to be skewed by the fact that the most successful rural areas “get called up to the big leagues,” as Van Dam put it. But that’s not why things have looked so dire in rural America lately.

The Census Bureau generates two main measures of urban versus rural population. One of them defines as urban any

Densely settled core of census tracts and/or census blocks that meet minimum population density requirements, along with adjacent territory containing non-residential urban land uses as well as territory with low population density included to link outlying densely settled territory with the densely settled core. To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters.

This definition has not remained entirely consistent through the decades, with the biggest changes coming in 1950 and 2000, but the numbers do still provide a fairly accurate picture of a nation moving from countryside to city, town and, especially since the middle of the 20th century, suburb. While the shift from rural to urban slowed in the 1970s and 1980s, it seems to have picked up again after that (some but not all of the jump in urban share from 1990 to 2000 was due to definition changes).

A Statistical Tweak Can’t Solve Rural America’s Problems

This is not, however, the urban-rural measure that gets most of the attention. In part because the data is much more frequently updated, it is the divide between counties that are included in metropolitan statistical areas and those that aren’t that dominates discussions of the state of rural America. These metropolitan areas are delineated every few years (most recently in September 2018) by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and they consist of “at least one urbanized area of 50,000 or more population, plus adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties.” Over time, a lot of new counties have been swept into these metropolitan orbits, and a few have been cast off, with the net result that — as Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire, Daniel Lichter of Cornell University and John Cromartie of the U.S. Department of Agriculture wrote in the 2018 Rural Sociological Society paper that inspired Van Dam’s Post article — most of the declines since 1940 in the nonmetropolitan population “resulted paradoxically from rapid population growth, followed by subsequent reclassification to metropolitan status.”

But Johnson, Lichter and Cromartie also wrote that nonmetropolitan counties “are now experiencing absolute depopulation for the first time in America’s history,” which is something Cromartie had been pointing out for a while in the USDA’s annual Rural America at a Glance reports (one of which I devoted a column to in 2017), although the latest one does show modest growth from July 2016 to July 2017.

A Statistical Tweak Can’t Solve Rural America’s Problems

These statistics are, as noted, affected by changing metropolitan-area definitions. Use the metro-area definitions from 1950, as Van Dam demonstrates in the Post, and the nonmetropolitan counties of then have actually grown faster than the metropolitan counties of then. But use the definitions from 2018, as the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis does in creating population time series to enable the calculation of metro-area per capita personal income and gross domestic product, and the nonmetropolitan counties have been laggards since the 1970s.

A Statistical Tweak Can’t Solve Rural America’s Problems

One thing that this accounting makes apparent is that the nonmetro population declines of the past few years have actually not been unprecedented for the counties experiencing them, which faced even steeper population drops in the mid-1980s. Those declines were caused by people fleeing in the midst of a farm crisis. The recent population declines have also been driven by out-migration, but this time the aging of the nonmetro population, along with falling fertility rates, has also meant that births are only barely outpacing deaths. (Note that this chart goes back to following whatever the metropolitan-area delineations were at the time, not using just the 2018 delineations.)

A Statistical Tweak Can’t Solve Rural America’s Problems

According to the latest Rural America at a Glance, almost 85% of the 1,104 U.S. “older age” counties, where more than one-fifth of the population is 65 or older, are outside of metropolitan areas (these older-age counties account for 47% of the 1,976 nonmetro counties). Some, mainly in “the Upper Great Lakes, the Appalachians and Ozarks, Texas Hill country, and throughout the Rocky Mountain West,” are seeing net in-migration of retirees, which has helped bring nonmetropolitan net migration back up to zero but is not going to be any help going forward on the births-minus-deaths equation. Slicing the data another way, the University of New Hampshire’s Johnson found that nonmetro counties adjacent to metro areas saw net domestic in-migration in the 12 months ending in July 2017, but those that weren’t saw continued out-migration.

All in all, the U.S. counties that aren’t in metropolitan areas are (1) doing better than they were earlier this decade but (2) not exactly booming. And I don’t think we’re going to see a repeat of what happened from the 1940s through 1990s, when the interstate-highway-system-assisted sprawling of existing big metropolitan areas, coupled with the rise of new metropolises in the South and West, led to lots of nonmetropolitan counties graduating into the metropolitan ranks. Now, overall population growth is much slower and sprawl is, while far from dead, no longer driving development in many large metro areas. Most of the counties currently classified as nonmetropolitan are probably going to stay that way — and they face challenges that cannot be made to vanish by statistical revision.

It's also worth noting that, especially in Western states where counties can cover great swaths of land, a lot of rural territory ends up being included in metropolitan areas. The nation's most productive agricultural region, California's San Joaquin Valley, is all metropolitan. So is most of the Mojave Desert in California and Nevada.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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