So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, to come upon a rich new set of data from the nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group that tells a much more complicated story. EIG looked at 972 counties that it classified as “left behind” and found that they have experienced a modest comeback over the last several years.
It’s a comeback in relative terms, to be sure. But it’s striking nevertheless. Between 2020 and 2023, these counties gained more than four times as many jobs as in the four previous years. They birthed new businesses at their fastest rate in the 21st century. Some 48 percent of these counties lagged behind the national income growth rate, but that’s an improvement compared to 70 percent in the previous seven years. They still lost population, but at a rate of 0.1 percent, compared to 0.4 percent between 2016 and 2020. Nearly half of them have recovered most of the jobs they lost to the pandemic.
These were all counties that had experienced less than half the national growth in population and median household income between 2000 and 2016. That’s what got them classified by the EIG study as left behind. They are home to 59 million people and 18 percent of the national population. Most of them are rural, although there are quite a few urban left-behinds, and in general they are the more populous ones.
There’s no point in going too far with this. Household income in the 972 counties still lags far behind household income in the rest of the United States. There are still fewer jobs in these counties than there were 25 years ago. But what’s been happening isn’t nothing. As the authors of the study point out, “Rural left-behind counties are among those leading the post-pandemic employment recovery.”
Michigan has the unwanted distinction of hosting the nation’s largest share of left-behind counties, 63 of them all told, with 6.7 million residents, a slightly larger share than in neighboring Illinois and Ohio, the runners-up. But the authors cite one Michigan county in particular: Rural Van Buren County in the western part of the state, population 75,000, lost 3,000 jobs in the Great Recession and its aftermath. Now it has them back.
SOMETHING SEEMS TO BE HAPPENING in left-behind America, and in its rural reaches especially. The crucial question is what. Perhaps the most straightforward answer is that they have been beneficiaries of the Biden economic program, in particular the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Through these initiatives and others, the urban scholar Anthony Flint reports, the administration has doled out more than $1 trillion in grants and tax credits, jump-starting the production of advanced batteries for electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels and new high-capacity power lines. The administration asserts that these public subsidies have generated more than $250 billion in private investment, and that a fair amount of this money has gone to counties designated as left behind in the Economic Innovation Group study. White House climate czar Ali Zaidi declared last year that the investment has been concentrated in “places where opportunity has left.”
This is obviously a good part of what’s been happening in America’s beleaguered counties. But it can’t be all of it. It doesn’t really explain a reversal in population decline and a boom in new businesses. For one thing, contrary to popular perceptions, manufacturing has been expanding in much of America for quite a while now, not necessarily in Rust Belt cities and counties but in pockets of the low-wage Deep South and West. “A lot of new factories have opened since the 1980s in the United States,” the demographer Alan Mallach noted in his book The Divided City, “but they aren’t in the older cities, or for the most part in Northeastern or Midwestern states. They are in the South and West, in Texas, California and South Carolina. … Manufacturing is still going strong in the United States.”
I have no reason to doubt Mallach’s conclusions, but it seems fair to point out that as of 2018, when he wrote those words, there hadn’t really been much of an uptick in jobs or new businesses. Most of the factories that have arrived in left-behind places have been making things without the aid of a large traditional workforce. As recently as 2020, the 972 left-behind counties were leaking population at an alarming rate.
One thing that’s indisputably new since 2020 is the rise of working from home. This may be largely a middle-class and professional phenomenon, but it has also enabled urban and suburban workers who would rather live in cheaper, quieter and safer surroundings to make moves in that direction. It’s not a massive migration, but it’s probably big enough to show up in the EIG survey. For the left-behind counties, it may be enough to help convert a major population loss to a much smaller and more manageable one.
At the same time, there has been a well-documented movement of African Americans, many of them middle class, to places in the South where they have family roots. The majority of these moves have been to urban and exurban counties, to the environs of cities such as Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte, but there seems to have been significant migration to the rural and small-town South as well.
In a recent article in the online publication Stateline, demographics writer Tim Henderson cites a number of left-behind counties in the South that have been attracting Black newcomers. Alabama registered 0.7 percent population growth in the most recent annual statistics. That’s not all a function of Blacks returning to the rural South, but some of it probably is.
ALTHOUGH WE TEND TO THINK of left-behind counties and small towns as forgotten corners of America, the truth is that scholars and activists have paid a lot of attention to them over a period of many years. In the 1950s there was Richard Poston, a social scientist who developed a comprehensive theory of left-behind revival, based on an approach to community self-knowledge and action called “community drama,” in which townspeople study and dramatize their town’s history and possible future. Poston’s book Small Town Renaissance attracted a fair amount of attention, and he sought to take his ideas national, but with very limited success.
Longer-lasting efforts have come out of the Center for Small Towns, based at a branch of the University of Minnesota, and the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, Neb. The Center for Rural Affairs has been going for more than 50 years with a program of aiding rural entrepreneurs and immigrants. The Center for Small Towns seeks to “build capacity to better understand rural challenges and make sound decisions to improve rural communities.”
Both of these organizations have done valuable work, but it has been overwhelmed by larger societal forces. I’ve been visiting small towns in diverse areas of the country for decades, and quite a few that maintained healthy main streets in the 1970s and 1980s are now faced with boarded-up commercial districts and little or no street life in their downtown centers.
The towns with college campuses or hospitals (“eds and meds,” in development parlance) are generally managing to survive, and in many cases to thrive. County-seat towns are often struggling, but they at least they have a permanent governmental installation to keep them going. Small towns that don’t have any of these advantages are, for the most part, dying. They are contributors to the left-behind status of the counties in which they are located.
The study by the Economic Innovation Group seems to suggest that some of this trajectory may, for a combination of reasons, be starting to turn around. The Biden administration, one of its policy advisers told Anthony Flint recently, has been committed to ensuring that “hard-hit communities and workers reap the benefits” of infrastructure and clean-energy renewal, “including deindustrialized communities.” It would be a mistake to make too much of this. But it might be equally mistaken to ignore it.
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