Sequences of Demographic and Economic Change across Small Rural Places in the United States, 1940-2018

Myron Gutmann, University of Colorado Boulder
Dylan Connor, Arizona State University
Lori M. Hunter, University of Colorado Boulder
Stefan Leyk, University of Colorado Boulder
Johannes Uhl, University of Colorado Boulder
Taylor Jaworski, University of Colorado Boulder
Cyrus Hester, University of Colorado Boulder
Catherine Talbot, University of Colorado Boulder

The United States is experiencing regional economic divergence, where high-income jobs are increasingly concentrating in a set of superstar metropolitan areas and attractive mid-size cities, and away from smaller places. These challenges have been brought into public view recently through coverage of growing rural poverty, the opioid epidemic, rising suicide rates, and most recently, the spread of COVID-19 into rural communities. Despite the diversity of these challenges, the disparities between smaller communities and larger cities in the United States are situated within a longer-term restructuring of the economy, one that has its origins at the end of the Great Depression, or perhaps even earlier. While these trends are leaving many small places behind, there is little detail on how these patterns have played out over recent decades. We provide insight on these change by leveraging eight decades of data, some of it newly compiled at a scale heretofore unavailable, and new methods in longitudinal data analysis – multichannel sequence analysis – to examine shifts in the demographic and economic trajectories of small places. While many such places have lost population over the past eight decades, some have experienced gains which indicates substantial heterogeneity in how change is unfolding across the American rural landscape. Our analysis reveals that the recent evolution of small places in the United States can be captured by seven discrete trajectories of stability and change. We show that these seven trajectories are, to different degrees, closely tied to patterns of both social inequality and the economic restructuring of jobs.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 213. Demographic Response to Economic Circumstances