The first-ever overall decline in the number of people living in rural America may be ending, says USDA, drawing on Census Bureau estimates of population by county. The rural population held steady between 2014 and 2015 after four years of modest population losses, says USDA’s Economic Research Service. It gives credit to growth in rural employment but warns that falling birth rates and an aging population are “increasing the chances of overall rural population decline in the future.”
Until 2010, the number of people living in rural areas held steady, although an ever-larger portion of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. The collapse of housing prices in 2007 and the slow recovery from the 2007-09 recession “contributed to the loss in rural population since 2010,” said USDA. Fewer children were born in rural areas as a consequence of economic stress and more people moved out of rural areas than moved into them. About 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas now.
From 2010-15, a record 1,320 rural counties lost population, said USDA. “Population growth slowed considerably in the Mountain West and in eastern states for the first time in decades.” The shale oil boom fueled growth in the northern Plains.
The decline in rural population was small – 50,000 annually from 2011-13, 25,000 in 2014, and 4,000 in 2015 – yet “the pattern raised concerns about how long the trend might continue,” says the Daily Yonder. Within the overall improvement in the rural population, “the real growth in non-metropolitan areas is occurring in counties that have small cities, not in the nation’s least densely populated areas.” It calculated that counties with small cities gained a total of 27,000 residents in 2015 and rural counties whose largest town is less than 10,000 residents lost 31,000 people.
Demographer Ken Johnson of the Carsey School of Public Policy told the Yonder that a key factor affecting the rural population picture is the periodic re-classification of growing counties into metropolitan areas. For the Census Bureau, urban areas have at least 50,000 people; rural areas are regions with a smaller population.