The rural vote that was key to electing President Donald Trump in 2016 has focused a spotlight on rural America. Welcoming this new attention, academic researchers are zeroing in on identifying the best ways to revitalize the rural economy and dampen rural discontent. Presidential candidates are also joining the fold.
“There’s a reason rural people have felt forgotten and disadvantaged by federal decision makers. It is because they are. There is no question about that,” Chuck Fluharty, founder and president emeritus of the Rural Policy Research Institute, tells Agri-Pulse.
Fluharty warns against letting urban interests portray rural America as doomed to accelerating economic decline and “simply dismiss us.” He says it’s essential to “stop the argument that rural areas cannot thrive. That is not true.” Although some rural areas will continue to lose jobs and population, he says “other areas in rural America are thriving in place, at scale.”
As an example of rural thriving, Fluharty points to Paducah, Kentucky. After decades as a rural “micropolitan” area, Paducah is about to cross the Census Bureau’s 50,000-population threshold to become an urban “metropolitan statistical area.” One ironic consequence is that the population of rural America will drop by at least 50,000 overnight. Fluharty says this reclassification will paint a false picture of rural decline rather than rural thriving when “rural areas are highly successful at becoming urban areas.”
Another consequence is that for the first time, Paducah will qualify for federal Community Development Block Grants. Fluharty says every micropolitan mayor longs for metropolitan status to get the grants’ “multi-year assurance of federal funding.” To end this imbalance, Fluharty is working to get the grant rules rewritten to give rural areas equal access to the economic development tool.
Other researchers advocate having more rural Americans either commute or relocate to prospering urban areas. In contrast, Fluharty explains that “I’m talking to you from a farmhouse my family has lived in for seven generations, in a very poor county, in a poor area of Appalachian Ohio”—and that “There are things about this place and this people that are so dear to me that I will never leave.”
Fluharty acknowledges that rural Americans benefit from federal funding in many ways because “we are older, poorer, sicker, and more dispersed.” The disparity, he says, is that this rural funding primarily goes to individuals whereas in urban areas. “The majority of the money goes to economic and community development.” The result, he says, is “tens of billions of dollars that do not go to rural areas.”
Both Fluharty and the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a center-left nonprofit think tank, favor establishing regional growth hubs. The difference, Fluharty explains, is that while Brookings and others would target federal support on a limited number of midsize cities, “We suggest you invest in the nation’s 500+ micropolitan areas” for many reasons, including “natural resource policy, homeland security, public health, and the necessity of keeping a recreational future for our urban brothers and sisters.”
In this on-going rural/urban debate, Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program concludesthe best way to rejuvenate struggling rural areas may be “to invest in cities.”
In a New York Times Op-ed in April, MPP vice president and director Amy Liu and MPP policy analyst Nathan Arnosti wrote that:
“Proximity to cities does not solely explain rural prosperity. And some direct investments, such as broadband and rural entrepreneurship, can improve rural fortunes. Yet in an economy where private investment flows to places with dense clusters of prized assets, the best rural policy may be supporting the development of small and midsize cities across the country, improving rural residents’ access to jobs, customers, training programs and small-business financing.”
Brookings Senior Fellow Mark Muro, co-author of last November’s MPP report on “Countering the geography of discontent: Strategies for left-behind places,” tells Agri-Pulse that rural America is in the national spotlight thanks to “the 2016 elections and the explosion of rural frustration they displayed.” His report notes that, “Our failure to craft effective, place-sensitive policies has allowed growth and opportunity to concentrate in fewer and fewer places while leaving others behind. Now, the political impacts of these sins of omission and commission are clear. As the country has pulled apart economically, it is also pulling apart politically.”
He’s hopeful new ways will emerge to help the most isolated rural areas. But he also calls for recognizing “the overall trends are challenging given that our digital age favors urban density.”
Realizing the importance of rural voters, Democrats running for president are also starting to focus on how to help rural areas. Democratic front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a comprehensive plan that he says will include a rural economic development strategy to “invest in their unique assets, with the goal of giving young people more options to live, work and raise the next generation in rural America.”
If many of the ideas sound familiar, that’s because they echo similar themes expressed by then Sen. Barack Obama in 2007 as he campaigned in the Midwest.
For example, Biden says he would strengthen antitrust enforcement, create a low-carbon manufacturing sector in every state to grow the bioeconomy, invest $400 billion in clean energy with a focus on cellulosic biofuels, and invest $20 billion in rural broadband infrastructure. He pledges to dramatically expand the Conservation Stewardship Program to support farm income through payments that would protect the environment, including carbon sequestration.
Biden points out that part of the inequality between urban and rural areas is that some communities are more successful in accessing federal dollars than others. So, he wants to create a “Strike Force” to help rural communities access federal funds with priority given to persistent poverty counties.
Some of the other leading Democrats are also taking notice of rural issues. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg supports paying farmers for environmental stewardship and called for ramping up research and deployment of conservation practices to deal with extreme weather.
But Democrats on the campaign trail will have to compete with a steady stream of tweets and announcements from President Donald Trump, who has talked about his support for farmers and rural communities more often than any president in modern history.
Editor’s note: Agri-Pulse Editor Sara Wyant can be reached at www.agri-pulse.com. Agri-Pulse’s Jon Harsch contributed to this story.
