The rural poverty rate has exceeded the urban rate ever since the government began tracking both in the 1960s. The difference, 4.5 percentage points in the 1980s, has narrowed to an average of 3.1 points over the past 10 years, said the USDA in updating its rural poverty and well-being webpage.
According to Census Bureau data, the rural poverty rate was 15.4 percent and the urban rate was 11.9 percent in 2019. The recent peak for rural poverty was 18.4 percent in 2013, during the slow recovery from the Great Recession. Poverty rates are highest in the South, including the Mississippi Delta, and in Appalachia. “Pockets of high poverty are increasingly found in other regions, such as non-metro areas of the Southwest and northern sections of the Midwest,” said the USDA. “Deindustrialization since the 1980s contributed to the spread of poverty in the Midwest and the Northeast”
When the government began tracking poverty rates, the rural rate was twice as high as in cities — 33 percent in rural America and 15 percent in metropolitan areas in 1959, says the Census Bureau.