by American Communities ProjectOctober 03, 2019Print
On Sept. 26, 2019, the American Communities Project published a report on rural America, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Four videos from the release event follow.
Session 1: The American Communities Project Director Dante Chinni reveals report findings.
Session 2: Rural community leaders share their stories and insights with the ACP’s Ari Pinkus.
Roberto Becerril, Project Manager, Neighborhood & Development Services, City of Garden City in Finney County, Kansas
Daniel Busch, Mayor of Salem in Fulton County, Arkansas
Ellen Huber, Business Development & Communications Director, City of Mandan in Morton County, North Dakota
Ericka Nicholson, Director, Gove County Economic Development in Gove County, Kansas
Cedric Williams, Mayor of Forrest City in St. Francis County, Arkansas
Session 3: The ACP chats with Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, and Matthew Chase, CEO/executive director of the National Association of Counties, about key learnings and next steps.
by Dante Chinni and Ari PinkusSeptember 25, 2019Print
In 2019, rural America is a place that many discuss and debate but few actually understand well. In the minds of much of the citizenry, it is often a mythic realm, its boundaries and terrain defined by pop cultural imagery and datelines from small towns — amber waves of grain in front of an old red barn punctuated by a news account from a region defined as Appalachia.
As conversation grows about how to address or “fix” the challenges in the nation’s rural places, such a simple interpretation will no longer do.
The geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic landscape of rural America is remarkably diverse. Depending on the community in question, rural America can be hilly and remote, or it can begin at an exit off an interstate with flat lands stretching to the horizon. Its racial and ethnic composition can look like America from 50 years ago, or it can be ahead of the demographic changes that are reshaping the country. Its economy might be driven by tractors and commodity prices but more often by small factories and the retail trade.
Rural America, in other words, is not a monolith. Its wide-ranging, evolving communities have different strengths, face different trials, and need different policy solutions.
This report from the American Communities Project (ACP) at The George Washington University uses data and on-the-ground reporting to explore those differences and blow up the mythology that too often has come to define rural America. The analysis here, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, should inform the growing discussion about the “urban/rural” divide by showing the enormous complexity underpinning the phrase “rural America” in 2019.
The work here reinforces the idea that where you live matters a great deal to how long and how well you live, even within areas collectively defined as rural. It also explores misconceptions about the relationship between health and geography. Cross-analyzing data, including numbers from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, Gallup, and Simmons Consumer Research, the American Communities Project’s work here illustrates the gaps in opportunities for health.
The term “rural America” is not a simple one to encapsulate. Depending on your source, there are densely populated urban metropolitan areas that hold rural terrain and, thus, could be considered rural America. At the same time, there are some definitions of rural America that exclude small-town urban centers.
The map below contains the counties that are considered rural by the Health Resources and Services Administration definition as they fit into the nine rural community types of the American Communities Project.
Across our analysis of these communities, there are six major findings — and a list of important factors driving them.
Major Findings
The physical and demographic landscape of rural America is remarkably diverse. While there is a tendency to view rural America as the cultural world portrayed in Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic painting — of a white farm couple posing with pitchfork in front of their farmhouse and barn — there are more than 500 rural counties in the African-American South, Hispanic Centers, and Native American Lands where the median white, non-Hispanic population is under the national average.
The economic challenges and opportunities in rural America vary greatly. The average median household income in the rural Latter-Day Saints (LDS) Enclaves is roughly $55,000. In the African American South, it is less than $38,000. In the LDS Enclaves, the childhood poverty rate is 15%. In the African American South communities, the rate is 33%, which is 11% above the rural median.
Education matters. The three community types with the highest unemployment rates are also below the rural America average for some college education. The data suggest that, even with the immense diversity of rural America, improving education is key to a better life and more opportunity. A push toward extending educational expectations to community college could pay large dividends.
There are stark differences in health care as evidenced in health insurance rates. In the rural Working Class Country, only 9% of the population is without health insurance. In the rural Hispanic Centers, the figure is 18%.
Some parts of rural America are seeing dramatic losses in population, but other kinds of communities are growing. Nearly 80% of the rural communities in the African American South have lost population since 2010. But fewer than 50% of the rural counties in Graying America have lost population since then — and overall the population of those counties has grown.
Infrastructure, real and digital. Across rural America, there is little correlation between population and paved roads. Some of the most densely populated places, such as the African American South, have fewer miles of road than the sparsely populated Aging Farmlands. Internet connections and speeds also look very different in different community types. In rural Hispanic Centers, 80% of the households have a high-speed Internet connection, but in Native Americans Lands, the figure drops to 40%.
These findings underscore the nuance and complexity of rural America today. The larger point behind all these differences, however, is simple. When policymakers and funders look to create rural-focused solutions, they should not focus on silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all answers. The diversity of rural America can be a strength, but it also means single solutions are unlikely to work in all rural communities.
A Snapshot in Data
Many of the differences outlined in the bullet points above can be seen on the interactive map below, click on a county or enter its name in the box to see how it compares to its larger rural type on a number of different factors.
The Nine Rural Community Types
= median of all rural counties
Population change 2010-2018
Percentage white, non-hispanic
Percentage uninsured
Percentage in fair/poor health
Percentage with at least some college education
Median household Income
Miles of road in county
Median home value
For the remainder of this chapter, we analyze data from the nine rural community types across five broad topics: demographics, economics, infrastructure, daily life, and health care.
In subsequent chapters, we explore the ACP rural landscape with profiles of six different rural communities we visited:
two counties in Arkansas — Fulton (Working Class Country) and St. Francis (African American South);
two counties in Kansas — Finney (Hispanic Centers) and Gove (Aging Farmlands); and
These profiles put faces, voices, and real communities behind the numbers. We chose places proximate to one another to show how quickly rural America can change. You can get in a car in one kind of community and get out in a completely different one, all without leaving “rural America.”
In short, in data and on the ground, rural America looks nothing like the monolith it is often portrayed as in the media and in Washington.
We believe this report is a call for a new understanding about the complicated set of places that make up the majority of the nation’s land. The different community types we outline here hold different strengths and face different challenges. They are driven by different economies and different kinds of populations. Simply put, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to policies for rural America.
We hope this report is an important step toward people gaining that understanding.
Demographics
While rural America is often thought of as a sea of similarity — largely white and generally older than the country as a whole — the demographic look and feel can change on a short drive. The races and ethnicities that define one rural community can be very different from those in a rural community nearby. And while much of rural America has seen population declines, the drops are far from uniform. The differences are stark in the community types of the ACP.
Race and Ethnicity
On the most basic level, rural America, as defined in this report, is less diverse than the nation as a whole. The median county in our collection of 2,243 rural places is 87% white, non-Hispanic. The mean for all rural counties is 78% white, non-Hispanic, still less racially and ethnically diverse than the nation overall. (In the U.S., the mean is 60% white, non-Hispanic.) But the 2,243 counties look much more complicated through the prism of the ACP typology.
Among the 306 rural counties in the African American South, the median county is only 56% white, non-Hispanic. It’s also 36% African American, almost three times the national average. In the 153 Hispanic Center counties in rural America, the median locale is only 40% white, non-Hispanic. Meanwhile, it is 53% Hispanic, almost three times the national figure of 18%. And in the rural Native American Lands communities, 43 counties, the median county is only 29% white, non-Hispanic, while it is 59% Native American.
There are outliers in the other direction, of course. In the Aging Farmlands (161 counties), Working Class Country (321 counties), and Rural Middle America (551 counties), the median counties are more than 90% white, non-Hispanic.
The broader point in the data: The overall numbers for race and ethnicity in rural America mask key subtleties. Such distinctions mean that policymakers may need a more nuanced lens as they address the challenges in these communities. Outreach and approaches that work in Gove County, Kansas (95% white, non-Hispanic) may not work as well 87 miles away in Finney County (40% white, non-Hispanic). We visited both counties for this report, and you can read profiles of each in later chapters.
That diversity also means more attention needs to be paid to the racial and ethnic differences that can define rural communities. There is a tendency to think of “rural” as meaning small and homogenous. But in some communities, such as those in the African American South, there are historic divides that serve as deeply rooted challenges that need to be addressed and overcome. We saw that dynamic on display St. Francis County, Arkansas, where the community is digging in to address the issue.
Age
Another dominant media narrative regarding rural America: It is home to a rapidly graying populace. On the whole, the 2,243 counties we examined are older than the nation at large. Using the median and the average to measure the counties, 20% of the population is 65 years or older. That compares to an overall national average of 16%, a notable four-point difference. However, this does not capture the nuance at the community level.
In several of the communities we visited, we heard that finding licensed child care was a real challenge. The strains were particularly evident in Finney County, Kansas, the Hispanic Center we visited, where local leaders are working with existing child-care providers to become licensed child-care centers.
In the Hispanic Centers and LDS Enclaves, the median figures for the 65-or-older population (15% and 16%, respectively) are close to the national average. At the other end of the spectrum are Graying America and the Aging Farmlands, where the 65-or-older population of the median county is 24%. That’s a nine-point difference in the 65-or-older population in our rural types.
The data also show that, proportionally, large populations of young people are living in parts of rural America. The median counties for seven of the nine rural types sit at or above the national average for the population under age 18, 22%. And the overall rural median and average for that age group are exactly 22%. That suggests that a key challenge in these communities is holding onto people as they pass from adolescence to adulthood, when they graduate high school and plan their next life steps. Economic opportunity, or lack of it, plays a role in those numbers. We saw and heard this while visiting rural communities.
Importantly, the Native American Lands stand out for having an extremely young population. Only 12% are 65 or older and nearly a third are under 18. But those figures are deceptive. The reason for so few older people in those communities is a very high mortality rate. The life expectancy in the median Native American Lands county is lower than the medians for the other communities we examined.
Taken together, however, these age numbers underscore the larger point: Rural America is about more than navigating retirement plans and collecting Social Security checks. In some rural communities, child-care can be as much or more of a challenge than elder care. In others, concerns center on adult battles with depression and addiction. For most of these places, a major challenge is creating jobs that will enable them hold on to people in their prime working years.
Many Sizes and Densities of Rural
The many rural communities in the 2,243 counties explored here have diverse environments and the differences become clear when examining the populations. The median county in our rural county group has a population of 17,743, but the numbers across our collection of rural counties vary sharply, creating very different kinds of places.
The data on population also reveal that rural America may not be emptying out as quickly as some suggest. On the whole, 64% of the 2,243 counties in our rural group have lost population since 2010, but in terms of raw numbers, rural America has grown by about 1.4 million in that time. To be clear, that’s very slow growth. It’s a fraction of a percentage point compared with the roughly 63 million people who live in these counties, and it lags far behind the national growth rate of 6%.
More to the point, the story of population growth or decline varies greatly by community type.
Some types, such as the African American South, have seen widespread population losses, with 79% of the group’s counties losing population. But in other places, such as Graying America, fewer than 50% of the counties have declined. And in Graying America counties collectively, the overall population number has climbed by about 174,000 since 2010.
The population losses in rural America may be felt most strongly in the Aging Farmlands. Roughly 76% of those counties have lost population since 2010 and, perhaps more important, many started from a low baseline. That means further losses can have large impacts on local businesses and schools as well as local culture and mindset. Overall, the Aging Farmlands have declined by a mere 18,000 since 2010, but that number is enough to equal an almost three percentage point drop for the type.
The news media and popular culture often focus on the urban/rural divide, and the population density of urban areas does make those places different from their rural counterparts. But the data here make clear that racial and ethnic diversity is a large part of the story in rural America. In that way, the communities of rural America are not so different from the urban areas they flow around.
The depopulation trend impacting some rural counties is not radically different from the exodus to the suburbs that remade so many metro areas in decades past. And the racial tensions in some rural communities, such as those in the African American South, are not dissimilar to those in the nation’s urban centers.
In a broader sense, all the numbers here emphasize the need for a new understanding of rural America as a multidimensional and multicultural landscape that defies simple answers and definitions. For anyone looking to effectively serve these communities, it is vital to understand the racial and ethnic complexities within them.
Economics
For many rural communities, economic development sits at the heart of local concerns and planning. Analyses that show urban America driving economic expansion are not lost on rural chambers of commerce and neither are the forecasts that show the tech sector as an engine of future growth. But as the U.S. economy is being remade, the communities of rural America bring a diversity of backgrounds and strengths to the table. Their economic paths in the coming years will almost certainly be varied as well.
Income and Inequality
Probably no single indicator encapsulates the many different rural Americas more than median household income. The range in our 2,243 counties is massive. In some places, such as the LDS Enclaves and Rural Middle America, the median income ($54,900 and $53,200, respectively) are very close to the national median ($57,600) and above the median for our rural sample ($46,600). But other communities, such as the African American South ($37,900) and Native American Lands ($41,900), lag far behind.
It’s truly a complicated picture. That’s a range of $17,000 in household income in these different kinds of rural communities. Some of those differences may be due to regional cost of living, but those disparities don’t account for the entire range. In some communities, the differences in household income are more about steeper economic challenges and deeper historical deficits.
In some communities with large populations of color, there can be other economic disparities existing within a single place. Racial divisions are often seen as an ingrained part of urban America. Stories of white flight, redlining, and socioeconomic segregation are written into the histories of most major American cities. But those same divides can appear in rural locales. For instance, in St. Francis County, Arkansas, an African American South community we visited, the median household income for African Americans is only about $28,300, while the figure for whites is more than $10,000 higher at $39,500. And stories of white flight are deeply tied to it as well. In Finney County, Kansas, a Hispanic Center we visited, the median household income for Hispanics is about $42,300, while for white, non-Hispanic households it’s $61,600. And in that county, efforts are underway to foster dialogue across groups. For example, the Garden City Cultural Relations Board consists of seven members across racial, social, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds, which seek to promote cultural diversity.
Income inequality has become a major topic of conversation in policy circles. While the rural communities we looked at tend to have lower scores on inequality overall, the numbers for some communities are still high. Income inequality is defined as the ratio of household income at the 80th percentile to income at the 20th percentile. Overall, the 2,243 counties we analyzed had an income inequality score of 4.4, below the national figure of 4.9. But the counties in the African American South and Native American Lands were exceptions.
Both community types scored above 5.0 on inequality, with the Native American Lands scoring the highest at 5.3. In both cases, the inequality, again, primarily stems from income differences between racial/ethnic groups. The inequality number is lower in the other big minority community type we studied, Hispanic Centers. In those communities, the inequality number, 4.5, was just above the overall rural number and below the national figure. That may be because those communities tend to hold more and better job opportunities. Certainly, we saw this in Finney County, Kansas.
Yet the larger trend in the data is that income inequality is a less prominent concern in rural America than it is in the nation as a whole. That’s the good news. The more complicated point is that such greater equality may be due to a lack of high-income households in rural America.
Occupations and Employment Opportunities
Behind some of the income differences in the 2,243 counties we looked at are differences in the industries that dominate. Rural America may be seen as the land of rolling fields and tractors, but in reality, agriculture is not a big driver of employment in most rural communities. In fact, the biggest employer in all the communities we examined was “educational service, health care, and social assistance.” More than 20% of the people in every community worked in this field, though the largest percentage of those working in the Aging Farmlands, 21%, are tied to agriculture.
In many rural communities, the schools and/or the hospital, if there is one, are the largest employers and town anchors. These institutions can’t easily close when the economy takes a downturn or pull up stakes for better opportunities elsewhere. It’s one reason these assets are crucial to their communities.
Beyond that category of work, manufacturing is still a leading employer in many of the 2,243 counties we studied. The sector accounts for 16% of the jobs in Rural Middle America and the Evangelical Hubs, 15% in the African American South and 14% in Working Class Country. Retail is also a big industry in a number of the county types. And agriculture plays a major role in the Aging Farmlands (21%), Hispanic Centers (16%), Native American Lands (10%), and LDS Enclaves (10%). In every other type, agriculture accounts for 6% or less of employment.
The Native American Lands stand out for having a higher number of jobs in “public administration” (11%), but that is due in part to the federal employees living in those communities.
The rising service sector is also less of a story in rural America. That’s because retail trade tends to have a smaller role in these communities. Smaller populations have meant fewer stores for decades and online shopping has added to that story. Online retail has also had a special impact in these communities, giving rural consumers choices they have not had available to them historically when there were one or two small stores downtown or a Walmart in the town nearby. In many of these communities “shopping local” has long offered limited options.
Education, Unemployment, and Poverty
Any serious discussion of the economy cannot exclude the important role educational attainment plays in a community’s hopes for growth and a better future. Data show the gap growing in the earning potential between those with an education beyond high school and those without one. In 2015, an analysis of Census data found that college grads earned 56% more than those whose highest level of education was a high school diploma.
A 2017 analysis form the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the difference in weekly earnings between those with a high school diploma and those with just some college experience was $62 — that’s more than $3,200 a year, and the numbers climbed sharply as the education levels increased.
Higher levels of education, however, serve more than the workers; they serve the community as well. A better-educated populace is more likely to draw new employers and more good-paying jobs, a goal for many rural communities. Businesses increasingly want well-trained and skilled workforces that can adapt to a fast-changing economy.
And the data show educational attainment is one important area where rural America stands apart from the rest of the country. Overall, 54% of those between the ages of 25 and 44 have some time in college under their belt. That is 11 points lower than the 65% national figure for that age group. Again, however, the figures vary greatly by community type.
The numbers are particularly low in the rural communities with large populations of color. In the African American South, Hispanic Centers, and Native American Lands, the figure is under 50%. But the numbers are above 60% in Rural Middle America, the LDS Enclaves, and the Aging Farmlands, where the “some college” number sits at 68%.
Those numbers belie some of the common misconceptions about rural communities as places where education is not a top concern. The most rural of our rural county types have higher rates of educational attainment than the nation as a whole. But they also show that concerns about lower education rates among people of color should not be contained to just urban places. Again, reductionist views of rural America miss the larger point: that single solutions to challenging social problems are likely to be ineffective in rural America. While higher educational attainment is a goal for all communities, there are varying levels of need in rural communities.
Using the broadest measure of the 2,243 counties we examined, unemployment in rural America roughly matches the national average. The national unemployment rate was 4.4% in 2017, with the rural America clocking in at 4.5%. But the similarity in numbers masks a lot of nuance. In some communities, the rate was below the national figure; in others, it was above. In both cases, the percentages differed substantially among the various county types.
In the Aging Farmlands, LDS Enclaves, and Rural Middle America, the unemployment rates were 4% or lower. But in the African American South and Native American Lands, the figure stood at 6%. More interesting, the figures here don’t seem to have a common driver. For instance, the Aging Farmlands and Rural Middle America are driven by different industries (agriculture and manufacturing) and are at opposite ends of the population density scale. What’s behind the differences?
Education stands out as a factor. The three community types with the highest rates of educational attainment also have the lowest unemployment rates. The three community types with the highest unemployment rates are also below the rural America average for some college. Those data suggest that one of the best ways to help the many different economies of rural America may be to invest in improving education. An effort to make at least some time at a community college part of community expectations could be a boon to local chambers of commerce — and building relationships with those schools could pay dividends.
The one exception seems to be Hispanic Centers, which have the lowest educational attainment rates but also have an unemployment rate that matches the national average and rural America median. The vibrancy of these economies is a key reason. Many tend to be small urban hubs in larger rural areas, places that are commercial centers often with a base around agriculture processing.
When it comes to children living in poverty, the connections between educational attainment and economic opportunity are clearer.
A third of children in the African American South and Native American Lands live in poverty. The same is true for a quarter of the children in Hispanic Centers. The rates are far lower in the Aging Farmlands, Rural Middle America, and LDS Enclaves.
Financial Well-Being
Financial well-being in rural America on the whole could be improved, but there are clear fissures among different kinds of communities, according to Gallup’s recent well-being research. Note that Gallup’s breakdown encompasses all 3,100-plus counties across America. Here we zero in on the nine rural types.
At least 40% of residents in rural-oriented communities have worried about money in the past week. The most rural community types — Native American Lands and Aging Farmlands — have the highest rates at 45% each. The African American South, Working Class Country, and LDS Enclaves are close behind at 44%; Evangelical Hubs report 42%; while Hispanic Centers, Rural Middle America, and Graying America stand at 40%.
What makes this worry more tangible: More than 15% of people in predominantly rural community types say they do not have enough money to buy food. The variance runs from roughly 30% in predominantly African American, Hispanic, and Native American communities to under 20% in more moderate-income, predominantly white ones.
To be clear, none of these numbers are completely explanatory or determinative when it comes to the economic opportunities and challenges in rural America. For instance, unemployment rates may be low and education rates high in the Aging Farmlands, but there are unique challenges in those places as we heard when we visited Gove County, Kansas. High land prices combined with a trend toward massive acreage have made it tougher for young people to get started and stay in their hometowns. And while there are deep challenges in some Native American Lands, there are also innovative approaches to economic development in some communities, as illustrated by REDCO’s work in Todd County, South Dakota, home of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. (See our community profiles on Gove and Todd counties.) Meanwhile, many of the Hispanic Centers, are seeing population growth with young non-native families and schools that need to focus on students coming from homes where English may not be spoken.
Any plan to spark economic development and change in rural America has to take those differences into account.
Infrastructure: Real World and Virtual
For an economy to thrive, people and ideas and products have to be able to move in the physical world and online. That imperative can be a challenge in rural communities. In those locales, acreage is often vast and the connections between cities, towns, and homes can be tenuous. Fewer people usually means fewer roads, and lower population densities tend to lead to less interest from telecommunications companies to hardwire homes. Those trends are clear in the data, but so are marked differences at the community-type level.
Looking at miles of road, the median rural counties in the LDS Enclaves and Rural Middle America types are at the high end of our sample at 1,273 miles and 1,152 miles respectively. At the other end of the spectrum, the median counties for the African American South and Working Class Country are not even at 900 miles of road.
More interesting in the road data, however, is the lack of a correlation between people and mileage. For instance, the community type with the highest median population, the Evangelical Hubs with more than 23,000 people, has some of the lowest numbers for miles of road at 990. Meanwhile, Rural Middle America, with a median population of more than 22,000, has a median road miles number of 1,152 — that’s 16% higher.
Some of this divide is regional and might be explained by state-level decisions on resources. The communities of the African American South also have relatively high population numbers, a median of more than 20,000, and very low numbers for miles of road. One key element they share with the Evangelical Hubs: They are largely based in the Southeast. The greater miles of road in the Aging Farmlands is also noteworthy, especially considering the low populations of those places. Perhaps it is a sign of communities that understand the importance of transportation in places that live and die by the ability to move commodities from farm to market.
When it comes to digital infrastructure, the picture is nuanced. In terms of broadband Internet access, the rural counties in our analysis do quite well on mobile connections. In all rural types, the median county has at least 98% of the population with a 5 megabytes-per-second download speed and 1 megabyte-per-second upload speed, the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of mobile broadband.
Those high mobile broadband penetration numbers are not a surprise when you visit rural communities. Even in remote locales, the mobile Internet is often the dominant connection to the outside world, for everything from road closures to crop prices.
But when the conversation shifts to a fixed connection, with much faster speeds of at least 25 Mbps per second on downloads and 3 Mbps per second for uploads, the numbers look very different. There are sharp differences across the 2,243 counties. The broadband deployment numbers in Rural Middle America, 85% of the population, are not far off from the overall U.S. figure, 94%. But the figures for other community types are much lower. In the Native American Lands, the figure is 58%. In the African American South, the figure is 68%.
But the digital divide in rural America is not just about racial and ethnic differences. The median broadband figure for the Hispanic Centers, 80%, is much higher than largely white Evangelical Hubs, which sit at 69%. That may be something of a surprise considering that the Evangelical Hubs are among the more densely populated communities in our rural sample.
In general, however, our rural counties lagged the national figures on fixed broadband deployment — some by large percentages. And in a world where everything from entertainment to work can be contingent upon a strong Internet connection, that rural lag can add to the challenges for communities that are trying to attract people and employers.
Online News and Social Infrastructure
Even with those differences and challenges in rural America, however, one tech outlet holds immense power across all the different kinds of communities we examined: Facebook. In every one of the nine rural community types, more than 40% of the people report that they visit Facebook at least once a month, according to data from the consumer research firm Simmons-MRI.
Those numbers stand out across the board in these communities when compared to other social media and news sites — from Craigslist and Twitter to FoxNews.com and CNN.com. And the comparisons aren’t really close. FoxNews.com and Twitter tend to be in the very low double-digits. Craigslist is a little higher, but doesn’t break 20% anywhere.
Facebook has become something of a one-stop everything shop in rural America — a place to keep up with friends and headlines in communities where the local newspaper has taken a hit. In smaller communities, Facebook also serves as the local yellow pages, with local businesses using the platform to host their sites. In Todd County, our Native American Lands county, we heard how people’s Facebook pages are sometimes the most reliable ways to reach them. It is the online address that never changes. Facebook may not be a government entity, but in rural America is almost serves as a public utility.
In a larger sense, these financial, employment, and infrastructure data show that there is no single, cohesive rural American economy. The 2,243 counties sit in different situations, are driven by different industries, and face different challenges.
Housing Strides and Strains
If a person’s home is often their largest investment, rural America sits in a different place than much of the nation. For the most part, these communities did not experience the housing boom that the rest of the country did in the first half of the last decade.
The median housing value in all the types we looked at was under $200,000 — and in some places, the value was far under that amount.
For instance, in Hispanic Centers, Native American Lands, Evangelical Hubs and the African American South, the median home value was less than $100,000. That gives some indication of the wealth in these communities and of a big challenge they face. Lower values mean less for the community to collect in property taxes and less individual home value for residents to borrow against.
There are, however, some upsides to those lower values, a big one being higher home ownership rates. Less valuable homes also mean more affordable homes overall. In our 2,243 rural counties, roughly 75% own their homes. That compares to a national rate of about 64%.
There are some notable differences across rural America. The Native American Lands have the lowest home ownership rate at 63%, while Aging Farmlands, Working Class Country and the LDS Enclaves are all above the 75% figure. That’s a key anchor for citizens. It’s harder to leave a community when one is a homeowner. And selling a home in a place with a declining population can be difficult.
When it comes to severe housing problems, including overcrowding, high costs, and the lack of kitchen or plumbing facilities, the disparity between communities of color and mostly white communities comes into view. Consider the 9% rate in Aging Farmlands, compared with the 21% rate in Native American Lands — and both community types are 100% rural. The U.S. overall average for housing problems stands at 18%. This suggests opportunities to build affordable housing in Native American Lands, where the population is growing. In the Aging Farmlands, where populations tend to be declining, housing rehabilitation could take priority.
Homes in rural America tend to be at least 40 years old. Many older homes are found in whiter communities with older residents. For example, the medians in Aging Farmlands and Rural Middle America top the 50-year mark; Graying America bucks this trend.
Median Age of Home Structures by Community Type
Aging Farmlands
1959
Rural Middle America
1965
Hispanic Centers
1975
Graying America
1978
Native American Lands
1978
Evangelical Hubs
1979
Working Class Country
1979
LDS Enclaves
1979.5
African American South
1980
New housing units are most robust in two younger and older predominately white communities: LDS Enclaves, where more than a quarter of the population are under 18, and Graying America, where about a quarter of the population are 62 or over. The most rural places, Aging Farmlands and Native American Lands, have seen the fewest new units.
Daily Life and Health Care
A widespread belief swirls that rural Americans grow and raise a lot of their food, and therefore have better food access. This is not the case. The Food Environment Index, which takes into account distance to the nearest food market as well as income, ranges widely in the ACP rural universe. It’s highest in Rural Middle America at 8.2 and lowest in Native American Lands at 4.9. In the African American South, where the median household income is also lower and resources seem less abundant, it’s 6.4. Meanwhile, in the Aging Farmlands, dominated by agriculture but where exporting food to other markets is the focus, the index is 7.6. This matches the median for all nine county types in rural America. In the U.S. overall, the median is 7.7.
Health-Care Gaps
Lack of health-care access is a significant pain point across rural America. For example, uninsured rates reveal a wide disparity, with white communities faring much better than communities of color. The medians by community type are below.
Hospital closures, a prevailing concern in rural America today, also vary depending on community type. Evangelical Hubs have suffered the most with 28 closures, and the African American South next with 18.
The rural hospital issue has garnered a lot of attention in recent years, and the Center for Optimizing Rural Health has examined the situation in great detail, for those interested in learning more or addressing this problem.
When a hospital closes in a rural community, the impacts stretch beyond health. An analysis from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank looked at communities with hospital closures between 2011 and 2016 and found subsequent declines in economic growth and net employment in those communities. Communities without closures saw their economies and net employment grow in that time.
Considering the employment data we cite in this report, those numbers are not a surprise. In every one of the nine rural community types we visited, “educational services, and health care and social assistance” was the No. 1 industry for overall employment. (It was tied for first in the Aging Farmlands.) Closing down a rural hospital kicks a leg out from under the economy in many rural places. It takes away an institution in places where those kinds of employers can be scarce.
Along the lines of limited care access, the number of primary physicians and dentists per population also varies depending on the kind of rural community in question. For seven of the eight community types, a median of one doctor serves more than 2,000 people. Only Graying America, where about a quarter of the population are age 62 or older, comes in under 2,000 people to one doctor. Compare those figures to the U.S. overall at 1,330 to 1. (Hover over the dots to see the population figures.) More rural telemedicine services could help to narrow this access gap. Meanwhile, Gove County, an Aging Farmland we visited, breaks the mold with five M.D.’s per 2,600 population.
The ratio of dentists to the rural population overall and within individual community types shows a more extreme difference than the ratio of primary care physicians. Half of the community types, including heavily African American and Latino communities, are above 3,000 to 1. Compare the rural figures to the U.S. overall at 1,460 to 1. (Hover over the dots for population details.)
Well-Being and the Future of Rural America
Key indicators show that community well-being is relatively strong in rural America, according to Gallup’s recent research. Again, note that Gallup’s breakdown encompasses all 3,100-plus counties across America. Here we look at the nine most rural types. Take community pride, for one. In all these county types, a clear majority express pride in where they live. Homogeneous LDS Enclaves, Rural Middle America, Evangelical Hubs, and Aging Farmlands climb to percentages in the high 60s and low 70s.
More than 70% of residents in rural county types report feeling safe and secure in their communities. Residents in nonwhite and more diverse communities do not feel as safe as populations in homogeneous, white communities.
There is a great deal of citizen engagement for community betterment happening in rural communities. At least 20% of residents in predominantly rural community types say they have been recognized for improving where they live in the past 12 months; nationally, the rate is the same. Only Aging Farmlands, which are 100% rural, outpace the pack at 28%. Graying America, the African American South, and Native American Lands come in at 22%. Working Class Country stands at 21%. Hispanic Centers, Evangelical Hubs, and LDS Enclaves report 20%.
Those are high scores on issues that people want addressed when they are looking for a community to call home, and these issues impact the many different kinds of rural community we studied in this report. All of which is to say, despite the challenges in some areas, rural America still has a lot to offer in 21st century America. Growing and serving it in a rapidly changing world, however, will require a new and more complex, granular understanding of the many kinds of community that define it.
To learn more about rural America and the county-level data in this report, visit:
The Center for Rural Strategies, the nonprofit that aims to build opportunities for small towns and rural communities by building coalitions and partnerships, and by advancing strategies that strengthen connections between rural and urban places. The center also runs the Daily Yonder, an online news site devoted to rural America.
The County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, the comprehensive annual analysis of health measures and their underlying factors, is a wealth of knowledge and the backbone of the data in this report.
Todd County, South Dakota, 2019. Rosebud Reservation. Photo courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (c) 2019 Annabel Clark and (c) 2019 Josh Kohanek
More than a millennium before gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills in 1874, spurring the last great gold rush in the continental U.S., the Lakota people were born in these hills and roaming the surrounding plains. Today, one of seven Lakota tribes, Sicangu Lakota Oyate (“Burnt Thigh Nation”), also known as the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, is confined to the Rosebud Indian Reservation located in Todd County and parts of four other counties in the state. A Native American Lands community in south-central South Dakota bordering Nebraska, Todd County was named after John Blair Smith Todd, a Civil War general and Dakota Territory delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Residents say their roots here go back at least 2,000 years, likely longer, citing research from Sinte Gleska University, the accredited four-year tribal university on the Rosebud Reservation in Mission, South Dakota, as well as NASA’s tracking of star constellations. “We plan on being here for another 2,000. This is where we come from. We can’t separate ourselves from this land. This is our home. The bones of our ancestors are buried here, and we have a sacred duty to watch over and protect it,” says Wizipan Little Elk, CEO for REDCO, Rosebud Economic Development Corporation. Formed in 1999 by the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Government, REDCO defines its purpose: “to generate revenue and create economic opportunity for the Sicangu Lakota Oyate and surrounding communities.”
What becomes clear in conversations is how trust underpins prosperity. Residents say trust has been broken and opportunity lost as a result of many U.S. government policies and practices spanning more than 150 years: severed treaties, killings, racism, forced sterilizations, forced relocations onto reservations and placements in boarding schools, and a lack of promised quality health and social services.
While the social, economic, and health adversities remain extreme in Rosebud — Todd is classified as a persistent poverty county — residents exude pride in their heritage and possess a steely mindset to bring restoration. Several organizations and institutions, including REDCO, Sinte Gleska University, Tokala Inajinyo Suicide Prevention Mentoring Program, Rosebud Sioux Tribe Head Start, and the Boys & Girls Club of Rosebud, are leading efforts to address daily problems, revolutionize Rosebud, and sustain the community’s promise for future generations.
Todd County Within Native American Lands and Rural America
Some bright spots for Todd County’s future: Its population has grown 5% since the 2010 census, countering the trend of rural America. Its youth population stands out at 41%, even among Native American Lands, where the median is 31%. In contrast, in broader rural America just 22% are under 18.
Yet the socioeconomic factors for youth are currently unfavorable. In Todd, 56% of children live in poverty, compared with 33% in Native American Lands and 22% in rural America. Nearly three-quarters (74%) live in single-parent homes. In Native American Lands, the median reaches 50%, while in rural America it’s 32%.
Todd’s median household income sits at $29,046, below the $41,900 median in Native American Lands and well below rural America’s $46,600. (In 2017, the federal poverty line was $25,094 for a family of four.)
Educational attainment is on the lower end of the scale. In Native American Lands, just 72% graduate from high school, and Todd’s rate is 56%. Compare that with the 90% median rate in rural America, according to the 2019 County Health Rankings. In Todd, 49% of 25- to 44-year-olds have some college education compared with 48% in Native American Lands and 54% in rural America overall.
On housing, 30% report severe housing problems in Todd, compared with 21% in Native American Lands and 13% in rural America. Problems include overcrowding, high costs, or lack of kitchen or plumbing facilities.
Todd struggles with many health challenges. Principally, the premature death rate is 22,124, considerably higher than the Native American Lands rate of 15,500. Both soar above the median in rural counties of 8,641, according to the Rankings. This refers to the years of potential life lost before age 75 per 100,000 population (age-adjusted).
Todd County’s teen births are 110 per 1,000 in the female population ages 15-19, much above the 65 median in Native American Lands and the 34 median in rural America.
Unlike many places in rural America, smoking is a persistent health behavior in Todd. The adult smoking rate is 39%. Native American Lands show a rate of 27%, while rural America’s is 18%.
Access to health care is very poor with a primary care provider ratio of 10,155: 1. Native American Lands’ ratio is 2,225:1, similar to rural America’s 2,288:1.
Todd’s food environment index — accounting for income and closeness to healthy food — is 5.1 compared with Native American Lands’ 4.9. Both rank much lower than rural America’s 7.6. It’s noteworthy that 41% of households in Todd County receive SNAP benefits — it’s the seventh-highest percentage in the U.S.
From Peace Treaty to Persistent Poverty: Noting History
The Lakota’s struggle to preserve their homeland has been a defining feature of life here. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie was intended to bring peace between Native Americans and whites by establishing the Great Sioux Reservation, which included South Dakota, parts of northern Nebraska, and eastern Montana. That hope evaporated after Gen. George Custer led a U.S. military expedition into the Black Hills with miners seeking, then finding, gold. The 1870s were marred by war.
According to Little Elk, U.S. encroachment started with a specific strategy. “Part of that strategy was the decimation of the buffalo. The buffalo were really the lifeblood for us. We don’t really see any difference between us and the buffalo….They provided our food, our shelter, our spiritual ceremonial items, our housing for teepees, utensils. Buffalo hides, in addition to horses, were the primary item of trade, the primary currency for us.”
An intricate system of various parts including buffalo had worked together for the Lakota’s endurance. As REDCO colleague Michael LaPointe, an economic development specialist, describes: “We had a pre-reservation economy. We had forms of government, institutions, and social service systems, but … the federal government never recognized those systems as existing and instituted its own policies that were so detrimental and really decimated an entire culture, an entire group of people….
“At the end of day we’re still reeling from those effects from those policies that were instituted at the highest levels of government. So our social and economic indicators … always lag in the bottom 10 [counties in the country].”
The Community’s Quest to Upend the Status Quo
Data as the Building Blocks for Change
Bringing crucial numbers to the fore identifies where the needs lie. While the U.S. Census reports that Native Americans account for 2% of the population, the 2018 Frontline Solutions report “We Need to Change How We Think: Perspectives on Philanthropy’s Underfunding of Native Communities and Causes” found that 0.23% of philanthropic funds are given to organizations led by Native Americans. Philanthropy News Digest noted “that support for Native American organizations and causes fell by nearly 25 percent between 2006 and 2012, even as overall foundation giving increased significantly.”
REDCO is taking initiative to start from scratch with data toward helping people live healthier, more prosperous lives, says LaPointe. REDCO’s Executive Assistant Katrina Fuller has been helping with the data collection for its comprehensive economic development strategy. “It was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do because you know for a fact these numbers are all wrong. That sign in Mission says there’s what, 1,200 people here. There’s not 1,200 people in Mission; there’s a lot more than that,” Fuller says.
The discrepancies are wide and differ by source. As an example, Fuller says, the U.S. Census recorded that 13,800 people live on the reservation, the Indian Health Service reported about 29,000, and the tribe’s enrollment report listed about 34,000.
LaPointe articulates why the chasm matters. “If you’re going to end poverty, who are you going to end it for? How many? That’s a very fundamental base question. If you can’t answer that accurately, then how’s your solution going to work. These are completely moving targets, some of which REDCO’s hit and moved along. From a statistician’s point of view, there’s a lot more to be done.
“My goal is to be able to get to a point where we’re going to build econometric models and see what variables are going to have the biggest impact in turning people’s lives around,” LaPointe affirms.
Reengineering an Economy for an Undefined Future
Rosebud Casino. Photo by Megan Jula.
On the Nebraska-South Dakota border just off U.S. Route 83 stands an economic pillar: Rosebud Casino, owned and operated by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. But generally businesses on the reservation are owned by non-natives while a majority of native enterprises run in the underground economy, says REDCO’s Development Officer Eileen “Taffy” Lafferty. These include catering, quilt-making, beading, selling wood, and being a shadetree mechanic. “You don’t pay taxes; you don’t have a business license, but you support your family. So if you look around, a lot of our kids don’t have role models of native businesses,” Lafferty says.
In similar respects, many people on the reservation only use cash and do not bank, Lafferty says. She points to the community’s fraught relationship with the only financial institution on the reservation, Wells Fargo, because of its support of the Dakota Access Pipeline. And the bank’s sole location in Mission is inconvenient for many residents who live miles away and cannot access reliable transportation.
REDCO’s Development Officer Eileen Lafferty discusses the giving versus saving mindset of residents and teaching financial literacy.
Also in Mission are two grocery stores within two miles of each other. Family-owned Turtle Creek Crossing Super Foods contains a large sit-down area for meals. Its website entreats shoppers with 10 points, including: keeping dollars in the local economy, creating local jobs, nurturing the local community, helping the environment by buying locally, and investing in local ownership. Down the road, Buche Foods, owned by a fourth-generation grocer, has a pay-at-the-pump location.
Todd County, South Dakota, 2019. Rosebud Reservation. Turtle Creek Crossing Super Foods. Photo courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (c) 2019 Annabel Clark and (c) 2019 Josh Kohanek
LaPointe notes that Rosebud’s leakage rate — calculated when people leave to buy goods and services elsewhere — is high at 83%. According to the 2017 South Dakota Sales and Use Tax Report, $148 million in household income leaves the Rosebud Reservation every year, and the 2019 U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that approximately $252 million per year exists here. REDCO wants to recapture what’s leaving and capture what’s here to support more native-owned businesses.
On reservation housing, two issues predominate. The community is short 4,000 housing units, and many homes, contaminated by meth, have been boarded up.
While the community wrestles with these daily challenges, a long-range plan for Rosebud’s future is in its formative stage. As REDCO leaders prepare thick binders and update a running spreadsheet and project schedules with ideas and plans, Little Elk explains the need for detail: “Rosebud Sioux Tribe Constitution says that we have a duty to consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
When his team had to figure out what such consideration meant for strategic planning, they decided to create a 175-year plan to explore far-reaching questions: “Where are we going to live? Where are we going to get our energy? What are we going to eat? Where are we going to get our food from? Are we going to have clean water? What does education look like? Where are we going to work? What kind of jobs are we going to have? What’s our relationship with technology going to be? What’s our relationship with AI going to be? Are we going to have a colony on Mars?… You can SWOT [Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats] this stuff out, looking at assets and opportunities,” Little Elk says.
The changing environment is agitating everything — but community leaders aren’t wasting time despairing. Little Elk explains, “We’ve been talking about the need to have a more holistic approach to development, locally and globally… We’re having to deal with climate change. We didn’t have anything to do with it, but we’re the ones that are being severely impacted by it….
“I think we have solutions we can provide to the rest of the globe. When we talk about farming and developing local economies and natural systems … those are going to be the solutions that are essentially going to ensure the continuing of the human race on this planet.”
It is firmly keeping with one of REDCO’s core tenets, sustainability: “Thinking of the 7th Generation and creating a self-sufficient environment. Moving away from dependence to uphold our sovereignty.”
Reasserting Lakota Culture
Quillwork and jewelry at Soldier Woman. Photo by Megan Jula.
Artwork at Soldier Woman. Photo by Megan Jula.
Just off U.S. 83 in Mission, Soldier Woman Art & Gift Gallery draws customers from around the world, carrying intricate artwork, crafts, and jewelry from Native American artists who use quill and beads among other fine materials. Artist and member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Linda Szabo owns and operates the gallery, where artists’ workmanship earns rave reviews online.
Linda Szabo, owner of Soldier Woman. Photo by Megan Jula.
It’s one of the many ways residents bring to light the community’s unique culture — across life stages. As Kevin DeCora, professor and chair of the human services department at Sinte Gleska University, puts it: “We have our Lakota culture, and that, in a sense, is what is really healing a lot of people and bringing back good things for these communities.”
The Lakota’s Seven Sacred Rites form the foundation to “live that spiritual way with action,” DeCora says. Two well-known ceremonies are The Sweat Lodge and The Sun Dance. Then, there’s The Making of Relatives, promoting the idea that no one is alone and there are no orphans. “We’re going to pull you into our family,” DeCora explains.
In the ceremony Preparing a Girl for Womanhood, a girl learns about her body, how to take care of herself, and how to be a mother. While away in a teepee for four days, a girl begins to understand how powerful she is. The ceremony usually occurs around a girl’s first period; DeCora says he took his daughter to one this past year. “This wasn’t happening 15 or 20 years ago,” he says, mulling if that’s because people didn’t understand what the ceremony was all about or didn’t know how it was supposed to proceed.
The Vision Quest is for boys in puberty as they take the path to become men. Boys learn how to make an altar and set it on a hill marked by a medicine man. While building their altar, they remain outside for four days and nights without food and water. “They ask the creator for a vision of how they’re going to live their life so it gives them purpose and direction,” DeCora says.
Lakota cultural elements are also woven into educational programs for children and adults. At Head Start, Director Vonda Pourier-Whipple shares how they inculcate youth.“We have our cultural basis. So they’re learning bits of the language. They label everything in our language. They try to impress upon the kids … the colors, the kinship system, certain foods, body parts….” Her team provides cultural trainings for parents by parents who teach skills they’ve mastered, like shawl-making and drum-making. “If we lose our culture and language, then we lose who we are as Sicangu Lakota Nation,” Pourier-Whipple notes.
Witnessing Triumphs and Trials in Education
Sinte Gleska University, founded in 1971 and named for a war chief and statesman, is one of 37 tribal universities in the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. The university’s mission is “to provide the people of the Sicangu Lakota Nation with an experiential-based program within the context of cultural and traditional values. All programs are designed to provide students with professional and academic skills necessary for employment and personal development.”
Sinte Gleska University. Photo by Megan Jula.
Sinte Gleska fulfills this role — and more. “It educates people and gets them out there and ready to go into jobs that are going to help people like human services,” DeCora says. “We have hundreds of graduates over 40 years that are all working with bachelor’s degrees in mental health, criminal justice, chemical dependency. So they’re working in the alcohol treatment programs, in the juvenile detention facilities, in adult correctional facilities, in the courthouses.”
One graduate making an impact is William Long, who after earning his bachelor’s degree, received the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council’s support to start the Sicangu Youth Program in 2018, focusing on life skills.“He came through here. He understands mental health; he understands genocide, assimilation, intergenerational trauma. Now that he’s in charge, he’s starting to put mental health pieces in there to move people toward the ceremonies,” DeCora says. Long is working on his master’s degree here now.
Moving down the educational pipeline, Pourier-Whipple runs the largest tribal program as director of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Head Start and Early Head Start. When she first started in 2010, the budget was $2.1 million. With Head Start duration funding, the budget is increasing to $6.4 million. Head Start’s child-faculty ratio is 10:1; Early Head Start’s is 4:1.
In addition to providing education, Pourier-Whipple and her team contend with entrenched social problems. “It’s intergenerational trauma. [Whether it’s] addictions, sexual abuse, it trickles down from generation to generation until you make a stand yourself and say, ‘Hey, I’m not going to live that life. I was raised that way. But I’m not going to raise my kids that way.’… It’s so hard for some people to do that. They’re enmeshed in it. ”
To help parents move onto a straighter path, parent education is available for the 315 families in Head Start and the 88 families in Early Head Start. “The problem that we run into is … the kids will tell Mom, ‘I don’t want to go to school today,’” says Pourier-Whipple. As a result, regular student attendance remains a problem.
Some parents do participate in the education designed for them, then want to become part of the team, she says. Access to attend Sinte Gleska University is a valuable incentive, Pourier-Whipple attests. Head Start pays tuition for a class, and an employee receives a pay increase after earning a degree.
“When I started in ’87…I was supposed to have an [Associate in Arts], but I was one class short,” Pourier-Whipple reveals. “After I got my AA…I got an increase…and then they paid for a class. I’m like, I think I’ll just keep going and ended up getting two bachelor’s degrees and then a master’s degree. The biggest strengths here are our college and our culture.”
Employees handle about 60 kids at a time. Their help takes many forms, including providing transportation around the reservation and even to pediatric dental appointments in Rapid City, South Dakota, more than two and a half hours away.
Currently, Head Start employs 116 people, with 25 additional positions set to open. While the program is growing, Pourier-Whipple always worries about staff outages. “On any given day, you’re going to have seven to eight people calling in, so you’re trying to scramble around. It’s people in this office who have to go in because we only have two classroom rovers.”
All teachers with degrees are paid $20 an hour, comparable to the closest school districts, but Pourier-Whipple has higher aspirations, namely that every classroom position in this program be paid more than the three surrounding school districts. “Hopefully that helps us retain our staff,” she says.
Todd County, South Dakota, 2019. Rosebud Reservation. Children involved with activities at Early Head Start. Photo courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (c) 2019 Annabel Clark and (c) 2019 Josh Kohanek
Turning Over Well-Being Challenges
Tokala Inajinyo Suicide Prevention Mentoring Program confronts the problem of suicide head on by training youth to be peer mentors. Project Coordinator Jessica Two Eagle, who started here as a counselor in 2014, reveals her motivation for working in this field: “I would say from a young age, losing a lot of classmates from suicide.”
Today, she says social media is one of the bigger stressors for young people and affects the unrealistic expectations they have for themselves. It’s leading to suicidal thoughts at younger ages.
In addition to offering suicide prevention services for youth and adults, the program meets groups in jail and the Juvenile Detention Center, and conducts anger management classes for the public. Opportunities to explore spirituality are available, too. The program regularly hosts events for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s 20 communities, and staff spread the word to outlying communities through social media, radio, and fliers. They also provide QPR (question, persuade, refer) training to help people recognize the warning signs of suicide and intervene.
For his part, DeCora says he’s certified 216 high school students in QPR. He’s also a master trainer for Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST), which he applies all over the area.
Finding Purpose Among Youth
Entrance to the Boys & Girls Club of Rosebud. Photo by Megan Jula.
Another positive force for youth is the Boys & Girls Club of Rosebud, which includes centers in Mission, Rosebud, and Parmelee, South Dakota. The staff comprises seven full-timers and 19 part-timers among the three locations. Executive Director Glen Marshall, who grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, finds purpose in helping children here develop. “I love that I get to do this, working with youth, providing something that would not be there otherwise, like our dinner program, or lacrosse, or baseball, or whatever,” he says.
About 485 kids are enrolled in the program, and about 135 kids attend the club daily, Marshall says. The elementary school program encompasses grades K-5 while the teen program includes grades 6-12. Two points of pride: turning a ’60s bowling alley and restaurant into an active teen center and starting a new academic tracking system.
The club uses its Facebook page to share updates of activities and events. For kids from low-income families whose phones may have been shut off or their phone numbers changed, Facebook is a steady communication channel because people can log in to their profile using someone else’s phone. Staff often use Facebook Messenger to communicate with parents because it can be the best way to get ahold of them, Marshall says.
What keeps him up at night are “kids with really bad home lives, with a lack of support and safety they need.” At the same time, Marshall sees a lot of hope: “We’ve got some youth coming up that are really motivated with an understanding of their culture…there’s a lot of people making efforts in that area.”
From Local to Global: Recognizing Universal Connections
As residents describe how culture and spiritual practices connect them to one another, REDCO’s Wizipan Little Elk stresses what binds the Lakota to all humanity. “We want what everyone wants: to have a say over our land, to be able to worship God, and to raise families in a safe and healthy environment. I think sometimes people like to get all mystical about everything… but we are the same as everybody else in those respects. We have our own language, and we have our own stories; we have our own customs and cultural practices and beliefs. That’s just what makes us unique, like any other group of people in the world,” he says.
Todd County, South Dakota, 2019. Rosebud Reservation. Photo courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (c) 2019 Annabel Clark and (c) 2019 Josh Kohanek
A common narrative portrays “Rural America” as one big place with one set of similar people and facing similar challenges. Yet, in reality, rural America’s geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic landscapes are remarkably diverse. Rural places can be hilly and remote, or begin at an interstate exit with flat lands stretching to the horizon. The racial and ethnic composition can look like it did 50 years ago or be decades ahead of trends. Their economies might be driven by tractors and commodity prices or by factories and the retail trade. The American Communities Project uses its unique community typologies as well as data and on-the-ground reporting to explore these differences and blow up the mythology of rural America. (Note: The multimedia report contains many graphics and interactive features that can delay loading time.)
by Lara Putnam and Gabriel Perez-PutnamSeptember 13, 2019
As the 2018 midterm campaigns hit their stride last summer, there was finally some mainstream recognition that post-2016 grassroots groups — sometimes discussed as “Resistance” groups — had become an electoral force to be reckoned with. Reporters and academics have established certain baseline facts:
Can we gather a more detailed assessment of where the new grassroots are? A previous post here tried to answer that question for Pennsylvania, combining electoral stats and firsthand observations to trace variations in grassroots intensity by county type and show the 2018 electoral swings linked to them. What does the data show across the nation as a whole?
As of January, some 4,600 groups were listed on Indivisible’s “Find Your Local Group” portal; the great majority had been posted in the first half of 2017. As we have discussed elsewhere, group listings there should not be taken as a complete list of post-’16 grassroots organizations, nor as reflecting the reach of Indivisible national headquarters per se.
Detailed study of the 225 groups listed for Pennsylvania and the 77 for Missouri confirms that some never came into existence, others are longtime local progressive groups with no ongoing connection to Indivisible, and still others have never had more than a virtual (Facebook or listserv) existence.
Map of Group Listings Included in Indivisible Portal, January 2019
Meanwhile, sizable numbers of similar, locally-originated post-2016 grassroots groups — groups with active boots on the ground, remaking politics in their communities — never chose to list themselves in the portal. But most often, such groups are in the same places for which portal listings are dense. In Pennsylvania, the correlation between the county count of Indivisible portal listings and the county count of unlisted groups that Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol’s research group has located through intensive local research is .87. In sum, we see every reason to treat this dataset of 4,600 posted, geographically locatable groups as the best available indicator of the strength of new grassroots organizing in reaction to the Trump presidency in any given locale.
Just eyeballing the blue dots in the map above already tells us that the landscape of change spreads well across the country, with a sizable presence in some middle American states that routinely vote Republican, and a meaningful reach well outside America’s big metros.
Note that we are not claiming these data capture all political organizing in the era of Trump. In some places existing local civic groups have remained the main channel for political organizing: This has been true for African American churches within African American communities both rural and urban, and seems to be the case with locally-rooted labor groups in Nevada. The dataset we are mapping is by no means a guide to all political action worth watching today. But it is the best guide we have to where the organizational landscape of center-to-left political engagement has most changed and grown in response to the 2016 election.
Studying the Grassroots by Congressional Districts
The following map, a choropleth that colors congressional districts by the number of postings (thus controlling for population density), makes the changing landscape even clearer. Rural, rural-mix, and sparse-suburban districts across Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arizona, West Virginia, Texas, and beyond show up as having a significant new grassroots presence.
Map of Group Listings Included in Indivisible Portal, by Congressional District
When we match those districts to their 2016 presidential vote margins, a striking pattern emerges — and again, it is not one of coasts-vs.-heartland polarization. With stunning rationality, new group formation was concentrated where groups could be most impactful: in the nation’s most narrowly balanced congressional districts.
Median Number of Groups Listings per Congressional District, for Each Decile of Districts when Arrayed by 2016 Presidential Vote
Of course, congressional districts are large enough that most encompass multiple different settings: chunks of cities; stretches of suburbs and towns, manicured and prosperous in some cases, grimly down-on-their-luck in others.
Using Counties and the American Communities Project
We can learn more about the kinds of local contexts shaping group formation when we map groups onto counties, and use the American Communities Project taxonomy to understand which kinds of places these counties represent.
First, let’s review how the nation’s overall population is distributed across the American Communities Project’s 15 county types.
Big City counties account for the largest share, with a quarter of the nation’s population.
Urban Suburbs (dense, cosmopolitan, and highly educated) make up nearly as large a share.
Exurbs (well off, less dense, and less diverse) account for half that population share.
Middle Suburbs and Rural Middle America (each less educated, less wealthy, and largely white), College Towns, Graying America, and African American South each account for roughly half the population of the Exurbs.
All other county types comprise even smaller shares.
The Trump Vote by County Type
These county clusters, varying by population density, age profile, race and ethnicity, education, income levels, religion, and more, display markedly different political preferences. Less than one-third of voters in America’s Big City counties voted for Donald Trump in 2016, while almost half of voters in College Town counties did so.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, three-fourths of voters in Working Class Country and Evangelical Hub counties and nearly four-fifths of voters in America’s Aging Farmlands cast their ballots for Donald Trump.
Where Grassroots Group Listings Are Highest by County Type
Given these demographic and political differences, it is not surprising that our Indivisible portal dataset suggests the intensity of grassroots group formation varies notably by county type. What is surprising is how little the pattern of grassroots intensity reflects the pattern of presidential vote choice.
Group listings were highest, per capita, in College Towns and Graying America.
At the second tier down are Big Cities, Urban Suburbs, and Rural Middle America. These have strikingly similar rates of group formation despite their very different demographic and political profiles. (Donald Trump got only one vote out of three in America’s Big City and Urban Suburbs combined; Hilary Clinton did just that poorly in Rural Middle America.)
A third tier includes five county types: Exurbs, home to 36 million people, Middle Suburbs of 16 million, Military Posts of 11 million, Working Class Country of 9 million, and Native American Lands of under 1 million.
The lowest rates of post-2016 group formation are in Evangelical Hubs, Hispanic Centers, African American South, Aging Farmlands, and LDS Enclaves.
How Graying America Stands Out
While most county types are consistent nationwide in having either lots or few postings to the Indivisible group list, others vary more. “Graying America” stands out (stats here): This category includes some of the counties with the very highest per capita counts and also a good many of the lowest. New grassroots organizing is very high in those counties that are disproportionately older because prosperous elder folks retire to them — Arizona, Florida, Oregon, and Washington. In contrast, it is very low in those counties — largely in the Rust Belt and High Plains — whose populations are older because the young people who can leave have left
This “Graying America” map should spark questions about the impact of newly organizing, fired-up liberal retirees in Arizona and Florida: places where most of their close neighbors and peers may be staunch conservatives. How effectively are the progressive newcomers or “snowbirds” that these indicators seem to capture, connecting up with potential Democratic voters around them — who in Arizona and Florida may be quite different from the newfound activists in age, class, and cultural coordinates?
Let’s conclude by shifting away from per-capita prevalence to simple totals. As we consider where new organizing is likely to make an impact moving forward, it’s helpful to know not just where the grassroots are strong per capita, but where the grassroots are strong, full stop. Here’s what that panorama looks like.
How Grassroots Groups Fit into Electoral College Map
To explore the potential impact on the Electoral College, we broke that down by anticipated presidential vote status as well. The resulting chart shows many, many postings coming from blue state Big Cities and Urban Suburbs: That captures all those new groups in metropolitan and suburban California (and New Jersey, Virginia, New York, and beyond) who flipped “Country Club Republican” congressional districts from red to blue last year.
But we also see significant indicators of group activity in the swing states, in purple here: Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, and Colorado.
The indicators of new grassroots presence in these swing states are spread far more evenly across county types than in blue states. They are found in Big City counties (as is a chunk of purple state population). But purple state Urban Suburbs, Graying America, Rural Middle America, Middle Suburbs, Exurbs, and College Towns are now home to significant boots-on-the-ground for center-to-left electoral action as well.
There has been a lot of supposedly savvy commentary recently about how narrow a slice of America will decide the 2020 presidential election. But post-’16 grassroots group formation shows regular citizens forging a far broader geography: of small-d democratic action today, and of capital-D Democratic possibility over the long term.
Lara Putnam is UCIS Research Professor and Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is active in grassroots political organizing in southwest Pennsylvania.
Gabriel Perez-Putnam (right) brings experience in data analysis and modeling from his work in antitrust consulting. His academic background is in engineering and economics, with a focus on human interactions with the built environment.
Nearly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. travelers plan to take a vacation this summer — many escaping to Orlando, Florida; a historical European city; or a city in the American West, AAA recently reported. This divide between domestic and international destinations comes into sharper focus through the prism of the American Communities Project. So, too, do the differences in Americans’ preferred vacation activities. (Discover what type of community you live in using our interactive map.)
Passport or No?
For a majority of Americans, traveling abroad does not appear to be on an immediate itinerary. Just 44% say they have a valid passport, according to recent Simmons Consumer Research data.
The rates are higher in more diverse, urban areas, yet no individual community type crosses the 50% threshold. Urban Suburbs, known for having a highly educated, multicultural population mix, reach 50%, while segregated, diverse Big Cities come up just shy at 48%.
In contrast, Working Class Country, the African American South, and Evangelical Hubs — poorer, more rural communities concentrated in Appalachia and the South — are well below the national average at 32%, 31%, and 30%, respectively. Rural Middle America, full of residents with average incomes and educations concentrated in small towns from Maine to Minnesota, is slightly higher at 37%.
Union-heavy Middle Suburbs, places in the Industrial Midwest hit hard by the globalized economy and more recently by America’s continuing trade fights, reach 40%. Graying America, often in rural areas and home to large numbers of retired seniors of moderate income and education, ticks to 41%.
Running in the middle of the pack are community types filled with educated, global-thinking, bilingual youth. LDS Enclaves, where many of Mormon faith undertake missionary work abroad, post a rate of 43%. Similarly, it’s 42% in College Towns, well-educated bastions where students learn the value of cross-cultural competency and studying abroad is commonplace. Hispanic Centers, home to high numbers of Latinos and youth, many of whom are immigrants, also stand at 42%.
AAA’s Top 10 Summer Vacation Spots
The top 10 vacation destinations, according to AAA’s travel bookings from June 1 to August 15:
Orlando, Florida (in an Urban Suburb)
London, England
Rome, Italy
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Dublin, Ireland
Paris, France
Seattle, Washington (in a Big City)
Anchorage, Alaska (in a Military Post)
Honolulu, Hawaii (in a Big City)
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
What Americans Enjoy Doing on Vacation
A majority of Americans say they like to sightsee on vacation, according to Simmons Consumer Research. That ranks higher than all other vacation activities. Going to the beach is the second most popular at 43%, and shopping comes in third at 36%. The top seven activities — all above 20% — are depicted in the chart below.
Dig deeper and distinctions emerge. For example, when drilling down to the community type level and looking at some popular activities associated with summer vacations, sightseeing is most favored in the homogenous Exurbs, Aging Farmlands, and LDS Enclaves. Sightseeing ranks below average in more diverse communities: the African American South, Big Cities, and Hispanic Centers.
The pattern is similar for another vacation activity that many Americans would consider a quintessential summer vacation: going to the beach.
People in LDS Enclaves are far and away the most likely to enjoy going camping/hiking on vacation, as the community type holds a rate that’s 56% above the average. Two other predominately rural community types, Aging Farmlands and Rural Middle America, are also more than 20% above average. In general, and perhaps not surprising given people’s comfort with their home terrain, camping/hiking shows a starker divide between rural and urban areas than other activities do.
Americans are recycling now more than ever. In the 1970s, the decade when Earth Day was formally recognized, people recycled just 7% of their waste, compared to about 35% today.
While that number is a clear improvement, it also that means that nearly two-thirds of the items we use, most of which could be composted or recycled, still end up in the trash. According to new data from Simmons Consumer Research, a majority of people across the country say they don’t regularly recycle. About a quarter of the population reports never recycling their glass, paper, metal, and plastic waste.
The U.S. recycling system itself is in dire straits. Prior to 2018, the U.S. shipped about 40% of its recycling to China for processing. But last year, China changed its policies, and the country no longer accepts most of the items the U.S. used to send over, such as mixed paper and most plastics. Municipal programs have struggled to adjust. Some have been cut altogether, with rural areas and small towns hit the hardest.
Differences Between Urban, Suburban, and Rural Communities
Breaking down recycling rates using the American Communities Project types shows that communities already have marked differences in their recycling habits. (You can find out what type of community you live in using our interactive map.)
Suburban communities — Exurbs, Urban Suburbs, Middle Suburbs — report that they recycle “very often” at higher rates, according to the Simmons data. People in Big Cities tend to report recycling only “sometimes.” On the other hand, residents of some more rural communities are more likely to say they do not recycle. Survey respondents from African American South communities, Evangelical Hubs, Native American Lands, and LDS Enclaves report “never” recycling different items at higher than average rates.
Take glass, for example. In the Urban Suburbs, more than half (51%) of people say they recycle glass beverage containers very often and more than one-third (39%) of people report recycling other types of glass very often. In LDS Enclaves, however, just one-third of people (33%) say they recycle glass beverage containers and just over a quarter (28%) report recycling other types of glass at the same frequency.
People also report recycling plastic differently depending on where they live:
One Barrier: Unequal Access to Recycling Programs
A mayor caveat to the findings, of course, is whether people actually are recycling as much (or as little) as they say. Additionally, recycling infrastructure across the country is highly unequal. About 94% of the U.S. population have some type of recycling program available to them. But a recent Pew Research Center survey found that about seven-in-ten people living in urban and suburban communities report having curbside recycling, compared with just four-in-ten rural residents. And an October survey by the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit aiming to improve recycling, found that more than half of Americans, particularly young and low-income people, feel they don’t have access to recycling programs.
What is clear across the country, however — whether due to a lack of resources, personal decisions, or the struggles of the recycling industry — is that recyclable bottles, bags, cans, and boxes are piling up in our trash.
In his opening presidential campaign speech, Donald Trump declared, “The American Dream is dead,” thus launching his campaign theme: Make America Great Again. This belief in the American Dream’s death was the “defining characteristic” of Trump’s enthusiastic Republican primary support, journalist and conservative commentator Timothy Carney soon realized, as he described in a recent interview with the American Communities Project.
In 2016, Carney set out to understand why the American Dream seemed dead to so many. He knew the widely discussed explanations: factory closures, more equal rights for women and minorities, old white men angry about losing their privilege.
Carney’s new book, full of personal stories and studies, is the product of his search for answers. Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse reveals how an invigorated community is the backbone of the American Dream. In his journey through America, Carney uncovered that “places collapse if they are not planted with institutions of civil society that connect people together and provide a sense of purpose. The places that thrive have those institutions, and in America, for the middle class, those institutions are mostly church,” as he put it in our interview.
Read on for more highlights of Carney’s research, his viewpoint shifts, and his ideas for rebuilding civil society. (Click on the anchor links below to jump to specific points of our interview.) Listen to the full, 34-minute interview.
Tie Between Social Capital and 2016 GOP Primary Vote
When I talk about Trump support in the book, I’m almost always talking about the Republican primaries. In the general election, there’s two choices; there’s so many confounding factors. But when there are 17 people on the ballot, for those choosing Donald Trump, my hypothesis was it was an expression that the American Dream was dead. It was borne out by the data in Iowa — the counties with the best measures of social capital were Trump’s worst counties. And Trump’s best counties were the counties with the lowest measures.
Two of the most educated counties in America are in Iowa, and they were two of Trump’s worst counties in the whole country. But Sioux County — where everybody is Dutch (they’re Dutch reformed); they go to church twice on Sundays; there’s two Dutch reformed colleges — was Trump’s worst county in Iowa by far. The other bad counties were where Des Moines is, where Iowa State is, where the University of Iowa is.
His best big county was Pottawattamie County, which is where Council Bluffs is. The Trump contingent — a huge number of first-time attendees — didn’t even have a leader. Jeb Bush had a precinct captain in every precinct there, even if he’s only getting five supporters in a precinct. Trump had the most people in that room in Pottawattamie County, but then they sort of disbanded at the end. Pottawattamie has the worst social capital scores of any big county in Iowa.
How Factory Workers’ Skills Relate to Family Formation
I call this the Joe Adams Effect. In 2005, there was a factory in Bloomington, Indiana, shutting down. I stopped by the union hall, and Joe Adams, the vice president, was losing his job. I asked him how he got into factory work. He said, ‘I was kind of surprised when I first wanted a factory job; they asked me if I had experience.’ Joe responded: ‘What do I need experience for? This is unskilled labor, right?’ You pick up a tool, you drive in a rivet, and then you do it again.
And they said, ‘You know what we want from experience? We want to know: Do you show up on time? Do you wait until the whistle to take your lunch, come back before lunch is over, and then stay until the whistle? Do you only call in sick when you’re actually sick? And are you willing to stick around and do this mundane thing for decades?’
This was 2005 — before I was married and had kids. Thinking about Joe Adams years later, I realized this is a prerequisite for being a dad. Can you show up on time, stay for as long as you’re needed, pick up basic unskilled tasks like changing a diaper and not burning the scrambled eggs and commit yourself to something that at times might be crazy-making for decades?
I realized factories cultivated these skills of the unskilled. You could call them basic virtues, and places that lost those factories lost a training ground for those virtues. If you go to college, if you go to a high school that expects you to go to college, a lot of those same things are there, while for the working class, the factory was the prime training ground. I included that because the data show that the retreat for marriage in America is mostly happening in the working class. And one of my explanations is that the loss of the factory job has meant less cultivation of those basic virtues.
Mancamps in Fracking Towns: A Natural Experiment
The mancamp is this warren of trailers and the rooms are fairly nice. It’s a flat-screen TV, a nice bed, good lighting; you are sharing a bathroom but only with three other people. Then there’s these massive quadruple wide trailers with ping pong tables, all you can eat fast-food, 24-hours a day, and big screen TVs for watching the game. It was dude-heaven.
In Williston, North Dakota, they effectively had to import lots of workers, but they also had to pay them a lot of money. It was $18 an hour for unskilled labor. If you had a commercial driver’s license, you were making six figures because this is fracking central.
But there was a study of these various fracking communities because what was the rare thing going on here: blue-collared guys getting a lot of money. So if we saw the loss of these good factory jobs preceded the retreat from marriage among the working class, the return of good jobs for the people without a college education should hopefully bring a return to the marriage and family formation. It didn’t happen in Williston, and it didn’t happen in these other fracking towns, as studied by Melissa Kearney at Brookings.
For me, the lesson of Williston was this isn’t a real human community. You are giving labor and they’re giving you money, which may sound like what all work is, but most jobs are different. They’re more relational. Most places are geared towards family formation.
Biggest Surprises in Research — It Takes a Village
Author Timothy Carney is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the commentary editor of The Washington Examiner.
One of the things that surprised me most is that I would find the phrase it takes a village to raise a family to not only be true but profound. This was, of course, Hillary Clinton’s book title, and to me as a conservative, it sounded like some collectivist thing.
A lot of my individualism faded away while writing this. As a parent, I never thought my wife and I were doing this on our own. But realizing that it wasn’t just that we relied on this help but that the whole undertaking of family formation requires this support structure of a community of multiple institutions.
For other conservative friends, one of the most surprising things is that the liberal elites practice what we social conservatives preach. They finish school. They get a job. They get married. They stay involved in their kids’ lives. I address in the book what I call the Lena Dunham Fallacy: this belief that liberal elites, college-educated elites, are all graduating from Wesleyan and then never getting married, and if they have children, it’s deliberately out of wedlock with no regard for the traditional family. That’s not the way it works.
One of the places I go in the book, Chevy Chase, Maryland, about 10 miles from my house, is overwhelmingly Democratic. It’s overwhelmingly wealthy and educated. If you go to a place like Chevy Chase, you will see them living the traditional family life: finishing school, getting a job, getting married, having kids, staying married — divorce rates in these circles are lower than average by far — and being involved in their kid’s life, coaching T-ball, and even going to church at a higher rate than I would have suspected.
Where Education Fits In
One of the places people thought I would talk more about was education, but I see school as being another institution of civil society, not dramatically different. When people say, ‘Oh, I’m going to send my kids to a good school,’ it doesn’t primarily mean that there’s some extra skilled teachers there or more technology. It means the other parents are very involved in the school. And so school can be a very strong institution of civil society, but it’s only in certain communities.
It’s a little depressing because it means there’s no easy fix. You can’t snap your fingers or pass a new funding bill and create a ton more intact families and involved parents in a school district. There’s deeper systemic things that have to do with the strength of community.
Impact on Young People
Across the board, the data show worse outcomes for people who grow up in places with worse social capital and weaker communities. Raj Chetty is a researcher who found that the No. 1 predictor of upward mobility by children was the number of intact families locally. And No. 2 was measures of social capital.
One of the things I remember from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was talking to this couple saying, ‘We’re going to beat this place,’ meaning we’re going to be successful, stay married, and raise our kid. They’re trying to overcome the culture in a way that I never felt particular counter-pressure.
Casting Findings After 2018 Midterms
In 2018, notably Democrats did well in places Trump had won in the Rust Belt or working-class places. Trump had won Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, and in all three of those states, Democrats won all the big statewide races.
I actually predicted this in a New York Times piece I wrote ahead of the election. I said some people thought Trump had brought about a realignment, bringing working-class communities into the Republican Party. He certainly didn’t do that. I mean the Republican Party still stands for certain ideas: lower taxes, pro-life, Christian conservative things; that’s not the agenda of the American working class.
But more importantly, I thought the vote for Trump was a vote that the American Dream was dead. And some of the very same people were saying the same thing when they voted for Obama, especially in 2008 and also in 2012. So I wasn’t surprised to see counties in Michigan go Obama, then Trump, and then go Democrat again in 2018. It’s not an ideological expression of their vote as much as it is an expression that things are thoroughly broken all the way to the bottom.
Recommendations for Reinvigorating Civil Society
It has to happen on the local level. The last chapter doesn’t have a lot of big federal legislation that can solve it because there’s no Restore Local Institutions of Civil Society bill.
But on the community level, anybody who is near the top of an institution that has any stability should just say wait a second: We are the ones who are going to help people’s lives be better. If you’re running a church in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, you have to think what I thought was the job of some government agency, or what I thought was the job of a nonprofit geared towards helping drug addicts, is my job. Not to just necessarily provide the acute treatment but to build an infrastructure. If you want people to get married, you can’t preach to them about the importance of marriage. You have to build the culture, a society, where there’s support and modeling for that.
A lot of it is on an individual level: Go to church and start a T-ball team. Even while writing this book, I started a T-ball team and coached kindergarten girls basketball and saw a positive value for myself and others.
We have to get rid of, weaken, or reform those policies that kill institutions or try to back them into corners. Sometimes there are people who don’t like the idea of churches and religious organizations getting involved. They say, ‘Your job is to lead worship and spirituality; stay out of civil society.’ I would like to tell people who disagree with religious institutions, OK, but let them do their good work without trying to interfere with them because that is going to be the backbone of the American Dream.
On a secular level, it would be a big gain for counties and states to move control of schools to as local a level as possible. People always ask me, ‘Are there secular things I can do what you talk about the churches doing?’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’ I’m from New York, and I know places in New England where the local schools really are controlled by the town. So then they become these defining institutions. The high school where I grew up was what made our town our town, and we had control over it.
In my current county, Montgomery County, Maryland, there’s no local control over the schools. It’s run by the county, which runs a dozen schools. Give people control over their community. That gives them a sense of purpose, the modeling, and the safety net to allow them to have the infrastructure around which you build a good life. That would be one public policy proposal that states and counties can carry out.
What Media Miss About Trump Supporters in Depressed Places
I think they’re missing the fact that it’s a local phenomenon, it’s a cultural phenomenon, and it’s a very real phenomenon.
Some people will chalk up it to pure economics. That’s what the populists on the right say sometimes: The steel jobs are lost. The oversimplification on the left is to say it’s cultural anxiety and then skip ahead to say, ‘Oh, this is just backwards and bigotry’ and that sort of thing.
What they’re both missing is the nature and the depth of the loss, that it’s not just that the factory shut down. It’s after the factory shut down, one of the churches had to shut down, and that people then didn’t go to the next church over, and they stopped going to church, and the coffee shop where people meet shut down.
Providing Helpful Reporting for 2020 Election
Looking beyond the purely economic explanations is the first step. And trying to deal with people on their own terms; there’s this bad habit in the press when somebody says something to respond with, ‘Oh, so what you’re saying is…’ and filling in the blanks.
Those are the two types of reporting we’ve had: People who just tried to give a purely economic account for it, or people who, when they gave a cultural account for the suffering, chalked it up to bigotry instead of alienation.
It’s tricky because I find people who live in places that have really suffered under alienation often love where they live, and will be very protective of it, and then can open up to lamenting how it doesn’t have what it needs to have and what it used to have.
Sometimes if I showed up and said, ‘I came to your county because by all measures it’s falling apart,’ they’ll say, ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about. We’re great.’ And then within an hour they’re telling me about how there aren’t these strong bonds. So listening and understanding the complex messages was a much harder undertaking than you might first imagine.
How to Reach Out to Alienated America in 2020 Campaign
It’s tricky because one of the things that made Trump appeal was articulating the pain that people suffer. And that will always be step one. I thought Hillary Clinton was incredibly tone deaf to go to Michigan right before the election and say, ‘The American Dream is alive and well as it’s ever been.’ How does that sound to somebody who remembers a strong town where people had a real ladder, and access to climb up the ladder, and now they don’t?
Trying not to demean and diminish their actual suffering would be the first way to acknowledge that this is real and that the roots of it are not purely economic. And to acknowledge that the repair is going to happen at the community level and that what you as a presidential, senatorial, or congressional candidate can do is provide some support but also make sure that nobody is interfering with people’s ability to build.
Feelings About the American Dream Now
What makes me feel more hopeful is that it’s not that our souls have gotten worse or anything. Looking at middle-class places, like Oostburg, Wisconsin, or Orange City, Iowa, I saw places that on a material level don’t have much more than the real alienated places. But they’ve built and maintained very strong church communities, so that’s made me think we don’t need to totally change the U.S. economy. We don’t need to change the character of Americans in order to turn things around. We need to figure out how to plant and make stick strong institutions in the places that are currently suffering from alienation.
More than 12% of Americans rely on food stamps to feed themselves and their families. The partial government shutdown, which forced operators of the food stamp program to make decisions in a pinch, continues to disrupt the lives of 39 million food stamp recipients.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, provides food stamps primarily to low-income working families, seniors, and people with disabilities. “For many poor families, SNAP makes a huge difference in their ability to get by,” Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, said in an email.
Disruption Can Cause Crisis for Families
The United States Department of Agriculture covers the cost of SNAP benefits, while states distribute them and split administration expenses. Households on average receive about $245 a month and, usually, states distribute SNAP benefits on a 28- to 31-day cycle. But as the shutdown dragged on earlier this year, and USDA’s funding for February remained in limbo, food stamps for the month were given out two weeks early to avoid potentially slashing money for the program.
Though the government is now funded, the cycle of SNAP benefits was drastically disrupted, according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank.
SNAP households could see an abnormally long gap between February and March benefits, with wait times depending on when states typically issue food stamps. Because of the early distribution of February benefits, CBPP estimated that about 90% of SNAP households, or roughly 30 million people, could experience a more than 40-day gap between receiving food stamps. About 4 million SNAP households faced a gap of more than 50 days between receiving food stamps. Such delays violate SNAP’s own law, which mandates that the program “ensure that no household experiences an interval between issuances of more than 40 days.”
To help lessen the strain, most states are planning to give out March benefits early. But damage has already been done.
“If you have just barely enough money to eke by, any gap will cause a crisis,” Nestle said. “Families count on SNAP benefits in their budget planning. They will have two choices: eat less or give up something else.”
Analyzing the Landscape of SNAP
The distribution of SNAP benefits varies across the country. In Wyoming, for example, about one in 18 people receive food stamps. Just a few states over, in Oregon, one out of every six residents use SNAP benefits. In some states SNAP households are largely concentrated in certain counties, as shown on the map. Alaska, South Dakota, Kentucky, and Texas each have at least one county where more than 40% of households receive food stamps.
In South Dakota, about 11% of the state population, or 93,000 people, rely on SNAP, including several counties where more than a third of households use food stamps. In Oglala Lakota County, a Native American Land in the American Communities Project typology, nearly 55% of households receive SNAP — one of the highest percentages in the nation.
“For many, it’s what they need to bridge that gap in their budgets, so that they are able to survive, pay their bills, and put food on the table,” said Matt Gassen, CEO of Feeding South Dakota, which operates food pantries and warehouses, and partners with organizations across the state to distribute food. He noted that South Dakotans rely on SNAP in all corners of the state, a fact which may be masked in more rural areas.
Monthly SNAP benefits also inject roughly $10 million into the local South Dakota economy. If the program were to lose funding — a real worry during the shutdown — it would take about 5 million pounds of donated food each month to fill that $10 million gap, Gassen said.
How SNAP Works
Eligibility for SNAP is largely determined at the federal level based on criteria such as income and assets. Gross monthly income generally must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line, or about $26,600 a year for a three-person family. Households with elderly or disabled members are exempt from that limit. In general, childless adults must be employed to receive benefits for longer than three months. States can apply for a waiver of this requirement in areas where unemployment is high and jobs are scare.
Food stamps are not intended to cover the complete cost of food for a household, but many families still count on them for their entire food budgets, Nestle explains. Even when the program is operating normally, most households run out of SNAP benefits before the end of the month.
Food banks and nonprofits like Feeding South Dakota are preparing to face the repercussions of a disrupted SNAP cycle. They know that when food stamps run out, people stream in seeking assistance.
“We are bracing to absorb the additional demand that we are going to see,” Gassen said. “It’s going to be a challenge for them, and in turn a challenge for us.”
Which Community Types Will Hurt Most
There are clear differences in which communities rely the most on SNAP benefits. In Native American Lands, one out of every four households receive food stamps. In African American South communities, the ratio is one of every five households. On the other end of the spectrum, in Aging Farmlands, LDS Enclaves, and Exurbs, less than 10% of households use food stamps.
Stakeholders Grappling With Uncertainty
Giving out SNAP benefits early, for the second month in a row, is an unprecedented disturbance to the SNAP cycle. “That’s just kicking the can down the road,” Gassen said. “At some point you have to catch up to get back on cycle.” It remains unclear when states will release April benefits.
Other impacts of a gap in benefits aren’t easily measured, such as the added stress on SNAP households caused by uncertainty and confusion.
“Messing around with SNAP benefits hurts the most vulnerable members of our society,” Nestle said. “We are a rich nation and can easily afford to help the most vulnerable. That we don’t do a better job of that is shameful.”
