Rural America is in better economic shape than the Census Bureau said in its annual report on income and poverty, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The think tank says rural and urban America enjoyed a decline in poverty and a rise in household incomes during 2015, according to a Census report issued two days after the bureau painted a picture of diverging conditions.
The bureau’s official poverty and income data come from its Current Population Survey. It said rural poverty and income levels stagnated in 2015 while conditions improved dramatically in cities — with poverty down by 1.2 points and income up 6 percent. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the American Community Survey is more reliable this year, mostly because the CPS data included a change in definition that lowered the rural population by 6 million people overnight; the ACS used a consistent definition.
“The much larger sample size of the ACS also makes it a more reliable source of information for non-metro areas relative to the CPS,” says Isaac Shapiro and Arloc Sherman. Using ACS data, they write, the rural poverty rate declined 0.9 percent last year, to 17.2 percent, while the urban rate fell 0.8 percent, to 14.3 percent. Similarly, the median household income in rural areas rose 3.4 percent, to $44,212, while the urban rate rose 3.6 percent to $58,260.
Even with the ACS data, the gap between rural and urban areas in poverty and income remains large.
The center says the lower cost of living in rural areas mitigates the lower household income, so much so that under an alternative poverty measure tracked by Census, the rural poverty rate would be lower than the city rate.