State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Rural Counties Are Making a Comeback, Census Data Shows

Route Fifty: “This seems to be the beginning of a return to population dispersal after a decade or so of clustering into cities and the biggest metropolitan areas,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Steady improvement in the economy and recovering housing markets may be prompting employers and job seekers to look again at areas that were growing before the Great Recession—suburbs, exurbs and small towns, Frey said.

Rural areas, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as counties outside cities and their suburbs, gained population between 2016 and 2017 for the first time since 2010. They grew by about 33,000 residents nationwide, after losing more than 15,000 residents the year before.

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