The US Department of Agriculture spends a fair amount of time and effort trying to understand what’s going on in rural America, for the simple reason that 99 percent of agricultural production takes place in rural areas.
Of course, there are other things that generally take place outside of big cities, and a good portion of those things can be classified under the heading of “recreation.” Other than agriculture and recreation, however, there’s not a whole lot that happens exclusively in rural America. We mentioned motorcycle excursions yesterday in Part Two. But really, it’s mostly agriculture and recreation.
According to USDA, the nation saw a decline in rural population starting in 2010, dropping to its lowest level in 2011-2012. In 2016-17, rural counties overall added population for the first time in this decade. USDA believes the upturn in rural population was coming mainly from increased in-migration, as opposed to natural change (births minus deaths). Increased net migration has coincided with declining rural unemployment rates, rising incomes, and reduced poverty since 2013.
Since peaking at over 10 percent in 2010, the rural unemployment rate steadily declined to about 4.4 percent in 2017. (Urban areas followed a similar pattern, with unemployment dropping from 9.9 to 4.1 percent.)
USDA provided an interesting map in the 2018 edition of their annual Rural America at a Glance publication (which you can download here.) This particular map refers to the ‘aging’ of rural America.
Colorado is the rectangle in the center of the above image, and I took the liberty of circling Archuleta County with a red circle (The red color is not meant to imply anything political; it just seemed like the right color.) As we see, there are 14 Colorado counties (out of 306 counties nationwide) where USDA attributes a higher-than-normal percentage of senior citizens to “recreation/retirement destinations.”
That’s us. A recreation/retirement destination.
The rural counties shown in green are aging mostly because young people are leaving. In the above map segment, they tend to be in the more ‘agricultural’ areas.
The salmon-colored counties have some other reason for getting older.
The yellow counties, meanwhile, are rural and still have relatively healthy mixes of younger and older folks.
The white counties are considered ‘urban’ by USDA and constitute nearly half of all US counties.
The 2018 Rural America at a Glance publication is 6 pages long and talks quite a bit about poverty, race, and ethnicity, and that’s understandable. Poverty, race and ethnicity are important to most any demographic discussion.
Despite the enactment and repeal of various state and federal programs, the poverty rate in the US has hovered consistently around 13 percent since 1965. But the average poverty rate in rural America rose to more than 18 percent in 2013 — the highest in 30 years — before dropping to about 16 percent in 2017.
Our poverty rate in Archuleta County is near the national average for urban counties: 12 percent. That’s substantially lower than the average poverty rate for all rural counties. Nothing brag about, but it could be worse.
As far as race and ethnicity goes in Archuleta County, the US Census says we don’t have much to offer than than “White, alone” at 92 percent of the population. About 18 percent of the population designate themselves ethnically as “Hispanic”, which means that more than half the community’s Hispanic residents consider themselves to be, racially, “White, alone.”
From the USDA publication:
Why is employment growth slower in rural than in urban counties? Understanding the sources of and barriers to employment growth can help guide economic development strategies and Federal policy choices. In many rural areas and among some groups of people, in-migration and overall population growth are the main drivers of employment growth: jobs follow people.
In other places and for other groups, new jobs from expanding industries lead to more in-migration: people follow jobs.
Aging, out-migration, increased mortality, and reduced fertility all hinder employment growth by reducing the size of the potential labor force…
I’ve discussed Pagosa’s employment problems ad nauseam here in the Daily Post over the past five years — the problems being low pay (a consistent problem since the Town was incorporated in 1891) and more recently, a lack of available, conscientious employees (which is bound to happen when you combine low pay with spiraling housing costs.)
I’ve also discussed the housing problem ad nauseam. (Most recently, here.)
We don’t have a shortage of jobs. We have a shortage of workers. Aging? Out-migration? Increased mortality? Reduced fertility? Probably all of the above.
But let’s talk about technology in rural America, because that could be a real problem. Maybe not in the way most people suppose, however.
Many people have argued that high-speed Internet is an essential key to ‘saving rural America.’ Many of the people making that claim have jobs building out the Internet. When you make your living providing broadband, it’s only natural that broadband seems like the solution to every problem.
There are people right here in Archuleta County who’ve been making the same claim: that our rural community will begin to flourish once we have high-speed Internet. Two of the foremost proponents of “broadband technology as the key to our survival” are local business owners Jason Cox and Eric Hittle, who have been put in charge of spending hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to brings us — or at least a few of us — into the 21st century, Internet-wise.
Last year, Cisco Systems put the reality of Internet traffic into stark relief. According to the company’s Visual Networking Index, video traffic will quadruple by 2022, at which point video will account for 82% of all IP traffic, up from 75% last year. Cisco also predicts increases in gaming and virtual reality traffic — reaching 4% by 2022.
Putting those numbers together, we get a forecast that, a couple of years from now, 86% of all Internet traffic will be for entertainment purposes.
So our readers might want to ask themselves, ‘Is technology the key to saving Pagosa Springs?’
Is that really why we moved here… to this “recreation/retirement destination”… to watch YouTube?