[The Hill] The number of rural Americans living in poverty has skyrocketed in recent years amidst an economic evolution that has cost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and mining jobs.Poverty rates have also increased in the nation’s urban cores, which have generally recovered more quickly from the worst recession in modern history.
The difference is that the increase in poverty in urban counties happened almost entirely during and after the recession. The increase in poverty in rural counties began around the turn of the century, and has been exacerbated by the recession.
After a decade of growth during the 1990s, the data show rural America has been effectively experiencing its own recession for far longer than the nation as a whole.
"There were fairly sharp declines in the number of places characterized by high poverty rates in the 1990s," said Brian Thiede, a demographer at Penn State and the co-author of a new report on rural poverty released by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. "This is a pretty stark reversal from what was happening in the 1990s."
At the turn of the century, about 1 in 5 rural counties had a poverty rate higher than 20 percent. Today, about one in three rural counties ‐ 657 counties ‐ have similarly high rates of poverty, the study found.