Tag Archives: rural areas

More rural residents, businesses don’t have local banks to borrow from

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A new study suggests fewer rural Americans have local banks who they can interact with and borrow from:

Increasingly, bank branches are headquartered in distant urban areas – and in some cases, financial “deserts” exist in towns with few or no traditional financial institutions such as banks and credit unions. That means that local lending to individuals based on “relational” banking—with lenders being aware of borrowers’ reputation, credit history and trustworthiness in the community—has dropped, according to a Baylor study published in the journals Rural Sociology and International Innovation.

Instead, more individuals launching small businesses are relying on relatives, remortgaging their homes and even drawing from their pensions—all of which are risky approaches, said lead researcher Charles M. Tolbert, Ph.D., professor and chair of the department of sociology in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences.

But for the 30 percent who obtain loans through the traditional lending method, that approach also can be very challenging, according to the research article, “Restructuring of the Financial Industry: The Disappearance of Locally Owned Traditional Financial Services in Rural America.”

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation statistics showed that from 1984 to 2011, the number of banking firms in the United States fell by more than 50 percent—to just under 6,300—while the number of branches almost doubled, to more than 83,000, according to researchers’ analysis of data from the FDIC’s national business register. For the study, Baylor researchers partnered with the U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies.

I’m sure financial institutions would argue it is not as profitable to locate in more rural areas that do not generate as much business as denser areas. It would be interesting to look at the exact figures from financial institutions in rural areas: are they not profitable at all or are they just less profitable?

However, how essential are financial institutions to local economies? The same argument might be made about hospitals: they provide essential services even as they are not as profitable in rural areas. (I would guess people would probably rate health care as more important than credit access but both are important for communities.)

The article hints at another aspect of this change: fewer banks in rural areas means fewer relationships between lenders and residents. While forming relationships may take time, couldn’t they be better for business in the long run? Prioritizing efficiency and profits over people may be good for the bottom line and shareholders but it is the sort of approach that seems to have turned off a good number of Americans to large banks.

 

Computer models of the effects of gerrymandering on urban and rural voters

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A new computer simulation of voting patterns by geography in the United States suggests gerrymandering may not be the cause of Republican majorities in the House:

To examine this hypothesis, we adapted a computer algorithm that we recently introduced in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. It allows us to draw thousands of alternative, nonpartisan redistricting plans and assess the partisan advantage built into each plan. First we created a large number of districting plans (as many as 1,000) for each of 49 states. Then we predicted the probability that a Democrat or Republican would win each simulated district based on the results of the 2008 presidential election and tallied the expected Republican seats associated with each simulated plan.

The results were not encouraging for reform advocates. In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election. This was true even in some states, like Indiana and Missouri, with heavy Republican influence over redistricting. Both of these states were hotly contested and leaned only slightly Republican over all, but of the 17 seats between them, only four were won by Democrats (in St. Louis, Kansas City, Gary and Indianapolis). While some of our simulations generated an additional Democratic seat around St. Louis or Indianapolis, most of them did not, and in any case, a vanishingly small number of simulations gave Democrats a congressional seat share commensurate with their overall support in these states.

The problem for Democrats is that they have overwhelming majorities not only in the dense, poor urban centers, but also in isolated, far-flung college towns, historical mining areas and 19th-century manufacturing towns that are surrounded by and ultimately overwhelmed by rural Republicans.

A motivated Democratic cartographer could produce districts that accurately reflected overall partisanship in states like these by carefully crafting the metropolitan districts and snaking districts along the historical canals and rail lines that once connected the nonmetropolitan Democratic enclaves. But such districts are unlikely to emerge by chance from a nonpartisan process. On the other hand, a Republican cartographer in these and other Midwestern states, along with some Southern states like Georgia and Tennessee, could do little to improve on the advantage bestowed by the existing human geography.

Perhaps this introduces a new strategy for political parties: the need to have more evenly distributed support rather than large clusters of support. But, as the bottom of the article notes, certain redistricting strategies like in Illinois or Maryland can provide Democrats some help in spreading out the effects of their urban voters.

Does urbanization in America explain the declining deaths by lightning strike?

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Here is an interesting research question: is urbanization responsible for the sharp decline in Americans who die by lightning strike each year?

In the lightning-death literature, one explanation has gained prominence: urbanization. Lightning death rates have declined in step with the rural population, and rural lightning deaths make up a far smaller percent of all lightning deaths. Urban areas afford more protection from lightning. Ergo, urbanization has helped make people safer from lightning. Here’s a graph showing this, neat and clean:

And a competing perspective:

I spoke with Ronald Holle, a meteorologist who studies lightning deaths, and he agreed that modernization played a significant role. “Absolutely,” he said. Better infrastructure in rural areas—not just improvements to homes and buildings, but improvements to farming equipment too has—made rural regions safer today than they were in the past. Urbanization seems to explain some of the decline, but not all of it.

“Rural activities back then were primarily agriculture, and what we call labor-intensive manual agriculture. Back then, my family—my grandfather and his father before that in Indiana—had a team of horses, and it took them all day to do a 20-acre field.” Today, a similar farmer would be inside a fully-enclosed metal-topped vehicle, which offers excellent lightning protection. Agriculture has declined as a percent of total lightning-death-related activities, as the graph below shows, but unfortunately it does not show the per capita lightning-death rate of people engaged in agriculture.

Sounds like more data is needed! I wonder how long it would take to collect the relevant information versus the payoff of the findings…

More broadly, this hints at how human interactions with nature has changed, even in relatively recent times: we are more insulated from the effects of weather and nature. During the recent cold snap in the area, I was reminded of an idea I had a few years ago to explain why so many adults seem to talk about the weather. Could it be related to the fact that the weather is perhaps the most notable thing on a daily basis that is outside of our control? As 21st century humans, we control a lot that is in front of us (or at least we think we do) but can do little about what the conditions will be like outside. We have more choices than ever about how to respond but it prompts responses from everyone, from the poor to the wealthy, the aged to the young.

Country music, social class, and rural areas

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Here is a discussion of how country music talks about social class, particularly lower classes, in small towns and rural areas:

It didn’t seem out of place to embrace a simpler life when all it meant was going without a few new dresses or sharp ties. In Garth Brooks’s 1990 song, “Friends in Low Places,” Brooks sings “Blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots, and ruined your black-tie affair,” as he addresses his ex. He is dressed inappropriately for a formal event and uses bad manners; unlike Hank Williams, who sang of his ragged boots as a point of frustration, Brooks revels in being rough around the edges, even if he is poking fun at himself. Similarly, in “Redneck Woman,” released in 2004, Gretchen Wilson sings that she can wear WalMart clothes half-price because she doesn’t need “designer tags to make my man want me.” She frames it as a choice. It’s not that she can’t afford champagne; she prefers beer…

But when being rural and low-income starts to mean that you’re living without heat or that you’re struggling to pay for your own groceries, these songs begin to sound bittersweet rather than celebratory. It’s tempting to play a “happy warrior,” especially when much of American culture frowns upon people who acknowledge any sort of victimhood. (After all, notions that the poor are poor because they’re lazy still persist in much of America.) But it’s hard to ignore some of the harsh realities of rural life in America today, and Musgraves and Clark in particular have taken the issue head-on. “Merry Go ‘Round” and “Pray to Jesus,” two songs eerily similar to each other in both melody and lyrics, don’t try to sidestep the dreary reality that can be a small-town or low-income life…

Clark and Musgraves’s songs, though, embody a state of mind country music needs to acknowledge more often. People love country music, in part, because it speaks to the heart of rural existence, a way of life that many people find happiness in and a culture that seems more authentic.

Yet, like all real cultures, rural life has its shortcomings. People become bored in a way that is distinct to an isolation of place. Rural boredom is different from urban boredom: Much of the appeal of cities is rooted in the excitement of newness, of novelty, so urban boredom is a result of being surrounded by stimulation yet still feeling alone. Rural boredom, by contrast, is often exacerbated by the tendency to wonder what you’re missing out on. It comes from wondering if there is more to life than a familiar community (like the one Miranda Lambert sings of) and the limited romantic possibilities and career options a small town offers. Musgraves, Clark, and Monroe capture that suffocation perfectly, and more artists should take their lead in being honest about the limitations of small-town life. Because sometimes, even country music’s unsinkable happy-warrior protagonist needs to reflect.

See this post from a few years ago discussing a similar argument. It would be interesting to try to trace the link between talking about social class and rural areas with the movement of country music toward pop/rock music and mainstream American culture. How much does the textual content change over the years? It is one thing to talk about a few artists who might be bucking a trend but a more rigorous analysis could reveal something interesting. Additionally, it seems that all of this could be linked to the decline of many rural areas in the United States. Even as Americans often hold romantic ideals about small-town life, America is now a suburban country and has been for decades. How much can you sing to an audience that increasingly is more familiar with strip malls, lifestyle centers, and big single-family homes about the difficulties of rural life?

At the same time, such songs could bring attention to areas in the United States that don’t get much attention otherwise.

Can you have a food desert in a rural area?

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A number of commentators on this new map of food deserts in the United States suggest the reason there are rural food deserts out West is because few people live in these areas. Here is a sample of the comments (from three different people):

surprise surprise……grocery stores don’t exist where people don’t live. It doesn’t take a statistician to figure that out. (Only to spend the time to show people that in a brightly-colored graph.)

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Commenters here have it correct. This graph is an absolute waste of time given that there SHOULDN’T be fresh food available where there are no people to eat it. “You can see the number of grocery stores multiply as you start in Nevada and enter into California’s urban areas.” Duh.

Crisis creation. Move along folks. Nothing to see here but smoke and mirrors.

The creator of the map explains how he measured food deserts in more rural areas:

Using the Google Places API, Yau search for the nearest grocery store every 20 miles (this included smaller stores–not just the major chains he plotted in his last visualization). “I chose those increments, because there’s some rough agreement that a food desert is a place where there isn’t a grocery store within 10 miles,” he explains, adding that in pedestrian cities the standard is closer to a mile. “And if you consider searches every 20 with a 10-mile radius you’ve got a fairly comprehensive view.”

There are two issues at work. One is how exactly to define a food desert. One mile might make sense in a city but is 10 miles a good measure in a more rural area? The second issue is behind the scenes and concerns more than just grocery stores in rural areas: how exactly should services and businesses be distributed in rural areas? How many health care facilities should there be? What about social services? Businesses and organizations could make a case that it is difficult to make money or cover their costs in such a rural environment.

One way around this would be to distinguish between urban food deserts and rural food deserts.

Population loss in rural America since 2010

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Countering a recent argument that rural areas are experiencing a “brain gain,” new Census data shows nonmetro counties experienced a net population loss between 2010 and 2012:

The number of people living in nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) counties now stands at 46.2 million–15 percent of U.S. residents spread across 72 percent of the land area of the U.S. Population growth rates in nonmetro areas have been lower than those in metro areas since the mid-1990s, and the gap widened considerably in recent years. While nonmetro areas in some parts of the country have experienced population loss for decades, nonmetro counties as a whole gained population every year for which county population estimates are available–until recently. Between April 2010 and July 2012, nonmetro counties declined in total population by 44,000 people, a -0.09-percent drop according to the most recent release of annual county population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. County population change includes two major components: natural change (births minus deaths, also available separately) and net migration (inmigrants minus outmigrants). Nonmetro population loss during 2010-12 reflects natural increase of 135,000 offset by net outmigration of -179,000.

New population estimates are subject to revision, the rate of nonmetro population decline since 2010 is quite small, and the trend may be short-lived depending on the course of the economic recovery. Nonetheless, the 2010-12 period marks the first years with estimated population loss for nonmetro America as a whole. Even if temporary, this historic shift highlights a growing demographic challenge facing many regions across rural and small-town America, as population growth from natural change is no longer large enough to counter cyclical net migration losses.

And here is an interesting chart looking at population growth in cities, suburbs, and rural areas:

This would seem to contradict the idea of a rural “brain gain.” Perhaps it is a more complicated story:

1. More educated people could be choosing to move to rural areas but less educated people are leaving rural areas in search of opportunities elsewhere.

2. A “brain gain” is happening in certain places but not across rural areas as a whole.

But, the takeaway is still important: this may be when American rural areas really run into problems as the natural population growth is not enough to keep up with out-migration.

A “brain gain” in rural America?

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A rural sociologist argues that rural America is experiencing a “brain gain” of young adults:

Hjartarson is among what University of Minnesota Rural Sociologist Ben Winchester coins the “Brain Gain,” in rural America.

“Discussions about the future of rural communities can have a negative tone, but this isn’t your grandfather’s rural,” Winchester said. “You look at the numbers and you can see the rural narrative is being rewritten.”…

However, the actual number of people living in rural areas in the United States increased between 1970 and 2010 from 53.5 million to 59.5 million. Urban areas grew, too, but at a rate faster than rural areas, resulting in a proportional decline of the population living rural.

“When it comes to 30- to 40-year-olds, one in five live in a rural area today,” Winchester said. “There is a growth in rural areas among the 30- to 35-year-old cohort, an age when a lot of people are re-examining their lives and looking for low density living. That’s also the cohort we are seeing decreasing in numbers in many metro areas.”…

“When it comes to the reasons 30- to 40-year-olds say they want to move to a rural area, jobs isn’t even in the top 10,” Winchester said. “Quality of life is No. 1. Others are a slower pace, lower cost of housing, and safety and security. Many of these people are creating their own jobs.”

Sounds interesting but we would have to see more data to tease this out. If the rural population increased 6 million between 1970 and 2010, how much of this was due to birth rates in these areas versus new residents moving in? How does the rural population growth rate compare to that of cities and suburbs? That to me is the real comparison: how do rural areas stack up against the dominant place of living for Americans: the suburbs.

Also, it sounds like this could be a class issue based on the quality of life issues pushing people toward rural areas. Who exactly are the 30-40-year-olds moving to rural areas? Would it be safe to guess that they are generally well educated and have the abilities and training for creating their own jobs?

Gun control legislation to move forward due to the support of suburban politicians?

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Here is an interesting theory on how the gun control debate may turn out: suburban politicians could tilt the discussion in certain directions.

More recently, Democrats appear to have found a different source of bipartisan support for significant new gun control: otherwise right-leaning politicians who represent suburban constituents. Lawmakers from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia have recently warmed to new gun legislation. As Philip Rucker and Paul Kane propose in the Washington Post:

The shift underscores a new reality of gun politics in America: The rapid growth of suburbs in historically gun-friendly states is forcing politicians to cater to the more centrist and pragmatic views of voters in subdivisions and cul-de-sacs as well as to constituents in shrinking rural hamlets where gun ownership is more of a way of life.

The growing political influence of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs in particular may have something to do with Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey’s sudden involvement in forging a compromise. Something similar is happening in the rapidly expanding suburbs of Virginia, a state where politics are dramatically different in the Blue Ridge than they are in the D.C. suburbs (the NRA’s national office also happens to be located right in the heart of the Northern Virginia suburbs). In gun-friendly Georgia, Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns is betting on pro-gun control TV ads airing in the Atlanta region.

Rucker and Kane again:

Unlike every other debate that has unfolded recently in a bitterly divided Washington, the gun debate is much more about geography than party. The dividing lines are not between Democrats and Republicans, but between rural lawmakers and those who must cater to urban and suburban constituencies.

This is interesting but it isn’t new in American politics: with the majority of Americans now live in suburbs, there are plenty of voters in the suburbs who could go one or the other depending on the issue or election. Indeed, the past presidential elections have hinged on the suburban vote as big cities have voted Democratic and rural areas have voted Republican. There are splits within the suburban vote based on geography: those closer to big cities, living in places like inner-ring suburbs that face many big city issues lean more Democratic and suburbs further out and the exurbs lean Republican.

I think we could also flip the causal direction in this argument: suburban politicians could indeed influence the gun control debate one way or another but, more broadly, couldn’t suburban politicians throw their weight around if they could agree? Some might argue American politics in the last 60 years or so has already been dominated by suburban interests (think interstate highways, the emphasis on the middle class, etc.) but imagine a suburban lobby that doesn’t just mediate between urban and rural politicians but dictates the main terms.

Argument: rural American voters are being disenfranchised

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A member of the Hoover Institution argues rural Americans are losing their right to self-governance:

With each passing election, rural and small town Americans have ever less influence on their state and national governments and ever declining control over the governance of their own communities. Their lives are increasingly controlled from distant state capitals and from the even more distant Washington, D.C., by politicians with little incentive to pay attention to their country cousins. To some extent, their disenfranchisement is the inevitable result of a century of urbanization and economic centralization. But the erosion of self-governance in rural America is also the result of a generally well intentioned but simplistic understanding of democracy and the associated elimination of institutional protections of local democratic governance.

Two ideas have been central to this effective disenfranchisement of rural America. First, that one person/one vote is an inviolable principle of democratic government under the United States Constitution. Second, that the winners of elections owe allegiance only to those who voted for them, no matter how close the margin of victory…

The reality is that rural communities have experienced a declining influence on state governance ever since reapportionment was first mandated in the 1960s. Many will say that this is as it should be. Rural and small town voters constitute minorities in every state, and minorities are supposed to lose in a democracy. But that is the same argument made against the Electoral College, given the possibility that a candidate who wins the popular vote might lose in the Electoral College, and it is an argument that also would condemn the much greater counter-majoritarian nature of the U.S. Senate.

Different and diverse majorities in each state are combined in the U.S. Senate to pursue national policies that are truly national and not just what will serve the interests of the nine states in which the majority of the nation’s population resides. There is no similar safeguard at the state level for different and diverse majorities in small town and rural communities that happen to constitute the red regions of the blue states—though there once was.

Prior to the 1964 United States Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims, most state legislatures included one house apportioned on the basis of population and a second chamber apportioned on the basis of counties or other geographical regions. Many of the former had not been reapportioned for decades, leaving growing urban areas with less representation per capita than rural regions. On the basis of the principle of one person/one vote, the Court found that the failure of most states to regularly reapportion their lower houses put them in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.

The first thing I thought of when reading this argument was that this is a long-standing tension in American history. Thus, we have mechanisms in national government that are meant to limit some of this. From the beginning, the interests of the more urban North were pitted against the interests of the more rural South. These issues still remain even though the geography has changed since then in several important ways: there are plenty of rural areas in mid-America as well as in the West and we have a broad middle category, actually the most populous space for Americans to live, called the suburbs. Additionally, party lines have shifted.

But, we could take this in another direction and think more creatively about how to select elected officials. Huffman argues the Supreme Court limited the voice of rural voters in states when it went to a system of officials per population rather than by geographical boundaries. What might happen if we went to a system where districts were drawn only within a single geographic group: cities, suburbs, and more rural areas? Huffman seems to be suggesting that the interests of a city-dweller in Chicago or Atlanta may be much similar to each other than representatives across northern Illinois where there districts can cover all three geographic types. Suburban legislators across metropolitan regions or states might have similar interests compared to those who represent other types of geographies.

I just have to ask: would conservatives be arguing for the voters in rural areas if it were primarily Democrats in rural areas as opposed to Republicans?

Data suggests cities, suburbs, and rural areas divided about Obama

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Recent data continues to suggest President Obama has quite different levels of support across cities, suburbs, and exurbs:

But the most important Obama divide to keep your eye on this year is the one between urban, suburban and rural places.

Urban America is still strongly in Mr. Obama’s corner, 66% say they are optimistic or satisfied. That’s down from 2009’s 74%, but not sharply. The suburbs have grown more skeptical with only 48% saying they are in the optimistic/satisfied camp. In 2009, 63% of the people in suburbs were feeling positive about Mr. Obama’s first term. And rural America is particularly gloomy about the next four years, with only 35% saying they are optimistic or satisfied. In 2009, 58% in rural America thought Mr. Obama would do a good job in the White House.

This is not a new split; Joel Kotkin, for example, has argued for years that the suburbs are the current battleground for voters as city dwellers tend to lean Democratic and people in rural areas tend to lean Republican. But the persistence of this divide goes beyond a red state, blue state divide that has been at the center of American political discourse for over a decade. It is not just about states, which matter particularly for Congress and electoral votes. Rather there are large divides even within states that lead to all sorts of more local issues about how resources should be allocated and who should be able to make decisions. President Obama is known for calling for a purple America bringing together red and blue states but perhaps he needs to call for an America that bridges the big divides between cities, suburbs, and rural areas.