AMERICA’S RURAL POOR
An Interview with Daniel Lichter, Ph.D
Daniel Lichter is director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center and Ferris Family Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. He is also a Rural Fellow with the Carsey Institute. Much of his research focuses on spatial patterns of economic opportunity and inequality, especially in rural communities and regions such as Appalachia and the so-called Black Belt. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America and the research advisory boards of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and the Guttmacher Institute.
Interviewed by Amy Seif on 4/5/07.
Amy Seif: What happened with rural poverty rates in the 1990’s?
Daniel Lichter: Like most of country, poverty rates in rural America declined during the second half of the 1990s before inching up again with the recession in the early 2000’s. In fact, at the end of the 20 th century, the nonmetropolitan poverty rate was at its lowest rate in more than 20 years. This is the good news. The bad news is that rural poverty rates remain higher than the national average, and they are especially high among historically disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities, single mothers, and children.
AS: What factors led to this drop in the rural poverty rate?
DL: This question always generates lots of controversy. Some analysts think that rural America benefited from a growing economy. In fact, the 1990s ushered in a period of substantial economic and employment growth – perhaps the most remarkable in U.S. history. Many rural areas, but not all of them, benefited. Unemployment rates were very low during this period. At the same time, the landmark welfare reform bill in 1996 emphasized economic sufficiency and work over welfare among poor single mothers. Caseloads declined rapidly in many rural states. The expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit during the 1990s provided new incentives to work – it helped make work pay. The 1990s also brought a “quieting” of family change in America, including rural America. Divorce rates stabilized or even declined, as did rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing, especially among teens. These positive family demographic changes placed downward pressure on the poverty rates, both in urban and rural areas.
AS: Is this good news for all rural Americans?
DL: Poverty rates are spatially uneven across rural America. Rates of poverty among African Americans living in the Mississippi Delta region, are extraordinarily high – often well over 40 percent. And, of course, Native American Indians living on Reservations also experience very high rates of poverty. Some small reservation towns in the Dakotas have poverty rates over 70 percent. High Hispanic poverty rates in the Colonias along the lower Rio Grande River provide another example of highly-concentrated rural poverty. The problem is these rural pockets of poverty are geographically isolated and largely forgotten in public policy discussions.
AS: So, is there any good news for poor minorities living in persistent poverty?
DL: The good news is that fewer rural minorities than in the past now live in persistently poor nonmetro counties, which are typically defined as counties with poverty rates exceeding 20 percent for three or more decades. In fact, the number of persistently poor nonmetro counties declined rather dramatically during the 1990s. It is too early to tell whether this decline resulted from transitions from poverty by the indigenous poor population, or rather that the chronically poor people or the unemployed simply moved out of these areas. For some historically impoverished counties, declines in poverty may also simply reflect the in-migration of the non-poor while leaving the economic status of the indigenous poor population largely unchanged.
AS: What do the poverty trends for rural children suggest about recent declines in concentrated poverty?
DL: Poverty rates among rural children remain higher than national rates or the overall rural poverty rate. A large share of poor rural minority children live in high-poverty rural counties, which often lack good schools, medical care, and other institutional resources that benefit children. These poor children are doubly disadvantaged. My concern is that recent declines in rural poverty may therefore be short-lived. Today’s rural poor children are likely to become tomorrow’s poor adults, especially in poor communities that lack the kinds of institutional investments that children need to become productive adults and good citizens.
AS: How do poor rural people compare in your studies of welfare reform to their urban counterparts?
DL: The overall lesson is that rural poor people and places have, in the aggregate, responded in much the same way as urban poor people and places to the work provisions contained in the welfare reform bill of 1996 and the newly reauthorized welfare bill. This has been surprising to many rural policy scholars. Compared with their urban counterparts, single welfare mothers in rural areas often lack good job opportunities and work supports, such as good public transportation and high-quality daycare for their children. Yet, they have overcome these employment barriers. It’s important to remember, of course, that poverty rates among married couple families with children – the families largely outside the welfare system – also have higher poverty rates than their urban counterparts, despite the fact that nonmetro family heads have higher employment rates, and often have more than one adult worker in the household. For many rural people, the problem is too little pay rather than too little work. And this is something that is frequently ignored in current debates about welfare reform.