The Challenge of US Rural Development

The first challenge of discussing US rural areas is to define them. I remember once reading a poetic definition that a rural area is a place where the shape of the land matters. But the US Census takes a different approach. It classifies each of the 3,141 counties in the United States as metropolitan, micropolitan, or neither. The “neither” category does not have an urban area of at least 10,000 people and is not in the commuting area of a nearby larger city. The “micropolitan” counties have an urban core of between 10,000 and 50,000 in population, and are not in the commuting area of a larger urban area. The most common way for research to look at “rural” America is to combine these these two categories of “nonmetropolitan” counties. Using this definition, rural areas are 97% of the land in the US, where 14% of the population lives. Rural areas also tend, with some exceptions, to be places where incomes are low, and where there have been many efforts over the decades to encourage…