The Emptying of Rural America

Richard Doak looks at the demographics of rural Iowa:

The Census Bureau estimates that Iowa’s total population grew from 3,046,857 in 2010 to 3,074,186 in 2012, a gain of 0.9 percent.
As always, the overall population gain masked the decline in most of the state. Sixty-eight of Iowa’s 99 counties lost population between 2010 and 2012, according to the census estimates.
That has been the pattern since about the year 1900, due to out-migration — people moving away from farms and small towns to find better opportunities in cities and suburbs in and outside of Iowa.
Lately, this out-migration has been re­inforced by another trend. Demographers call it “natural change.” A natural population decrease occurs when there are more deaths than births in a given area.
More than half of Iowa’s counties suffered a natural decrease in population between 2010 and 2012, according to the census estimates. Natural decrease has occurred in some parts of Iowa in the past, but apparently never so endemically as now.
When more people are dying than being born, a community will lose population even if no one moves away. The only hope is to attract newcomers to move in, but, with few exceptions, small towns and rural counties haven’t had any luck getting that to happen....
Today, most Iowa children are born and will grow up in cities and suburbs. In 2011, the last year for which the Iowa Department of Public Health has full statistics, more babies were born in the 10 most populous counties than in all the other 89 counties combined.
Of the roughly 900 towns in Iowa, more than 300 had three or fewer births among their residents in the whole year. More than 50 towns had zero births among their residents.
In Iowa’s least populous county, Adams, there were 39 births in 2011 (and 52 deaths). That’s just one birth every nine days. In Polk County, 162 babies would be born in those same nine days.
You don’t need the statistics to know rural Iowa isn’t the kid-producing machine it used to be. Drive through any hamlet, and you’ll rarely see children. Mostly you’ll see old people. The few working-age adults you see might be living in a trailer or a once-abandoned farmhouse where the rent is cheap.
Those realities point to another change. Economic inequality might be especially acute in rural America. Some rural school districts in Iowa have poverty rates, measured by free and reduced-price lunches, as high as those in inner-city schools. While agriculture is enjoying an extended boom, most rural people are not farmers. They often live in towns where being a convenience-story clerk is the best, and perhaps only, job in town.
The late journalist Hugh Sidey, who grew up in Greenfield in the 1930s and ’40s, wrote that Iowa’s towns were one of God’s best works. Youngsters in a small town, he recalled, could roam in total freedom, yet never be out of sight of someone who cared.
Those ideal places to raise children must still exist, but not in the numbers they did. They no longer account for the typical childhood experience of being an Iowan.

As farms have gotten bigger, there are fewer farmers, and fewer businesses in small towns serving farmers, and fewer opportunities for kids to get jobs and stay in the community.  The non-farmers get poorer, folks move to the cities for jobs, and towns die off.  It is bad for the rural areas, bad for rural residents, and bad for the country as a whole.  Politically, it is one more example of the existential dead end the Republican party finds itself in.  It's main stronghold gets smaller and weaker every year, and yet the party continues to alienate folks in the cities and suburbs while becoming ever more conservative to suit their rural, elderly base.  Maybe that makes sense to you, but it sure as hell doesn't make sense to this guy.