Thank you for joining us for Less People, the podcast about rural economic development. I’m Jenny Russell. So, last episode, we started talking about those people that have really influenced our thinking about rural areas and the success that you can have in rural areas.
So we talked about Marci Penner being my first inspiration and how successfully you can be in a small town, having the support as a young power up back in the day of a person that is 21 to 39 years old and who has chosen rural life as a rural by choice person. And she was one of the people that really kept me going, really kept me positive and really kept me in this kind of work in rural areas, knowing that it was worth it, knowing that what an impact I could make. So the next person that we kind of use as an example and kind of a rock star in our field of rural economic development is Ben Winchester.
He is a economist from up in the University of Minnesota. And some of the work that he does is really amazing. Some of the results are that surprised us and that really, I would say, reshaped how we think about economic development, to be honest, in Minnesota, in terms of economic development as a migration strategy.
And what does that look like today as opposed to what it might look like maybe a hundred years ago or so. So as Karen mentioned, I call it rewriting the rural narrative and really the premise behind all my life’s work has been that the narrative we’re using to describe our small towns and rural places is terrible, is based out of things that happened like 60 years ago. It really doesn’t reflect, I would argue kind of where we are today.
Just like having kids, you don’t see changes that happen week to week or month to month and your communities change, you don’t really see it. All of a sudden somebody from the outside says, man, you’re doing great. And you’re like, really? So like, I want to tell you that you’re actually doing okay.
Overall, you know, I kind of arrive at this point on the rural narrative that how, I mean, to be honest, how did we get to this point that the narrative about our rural places is so terrible, but on the other hand, I can’t find a home to buy anywhere. Like it is virtually impossible and the pandemic kind of showing a light on this. He’s been down talking a couple of different times on housing and how that can be really challenging in a small town.
A lot of times you don’t think about the fact that we have way less people living in a house than we did back in the 19, even 1960s. You know, people used to have big, big families. The farms needed those big families because there wasn’t a lot of, before the agricultural revolution is what I call it, when really machines helped the farm be more efficient, but you needed way less family members, way less farmers to farm that particular piece of land.
So a lot of what our rural population decline has been, it’s not because it’s not a great place to live. It’s because we were really dependent upon agricultural right before the agricultural revolution. And there’s always new people moving into our small towns and rural places.
And I kind of go back to that narrative here that we do have a narrative that we’re kind of living and working in. We’re part of the rural development industry with Dakota Resources and all these other groups here that you’re a part of extension. We do work in and for small places and we’re trying to do positive work in light of a narrative that might be negative, right? So, you know, despite our problems, we’re still alive.
You know, we can’t be seen as the exception here, really. I’ll talk about this a little bit later, but really there is a narrative that we’re working in and we have to admit this, that there is a brain drain. You know, people use these terms that live at, where do you live? Like in the middle of nowhere, because that’s easier to explain than some town you’ve never heard of.
So we just say, I live in the middle of nowhere, kind of west of, you know, Alexandria, Minnesota or something. We’re a sleepy town or nobody, everybody knows one another. Nobody locks their doors.
These are all stereotypes. Like we can’t give in to all these kind of kitschy little stereotypes that we have in a lot of rural places. It’s very Norman Rockwell-ish.
It’s very idyllic. It doesn’t have any basis in reality a lot of times. So even in our communities, we have a lot of narratives about what we used to have and could have had and should have had and might’ve had.
I share this story that I went to school in Morris, Minnesota, and they have a University of Minnesota campus there in Morris. And when there was a story in town that 3M was looking to move to Morris in the 50s and 60s, but then the council never rezoned the land north of the Highway 28. So obviously 3M never came.
And this story is like part and parcel of every common narrative you have in that community. But it’s not true. Like 3M never looked at moving to Morris.
And so we ended up kind of having these narratives in our communities based upon like missed opportunities. And why do we have these? Why do we have like a missed opportunity narrative? Because we don’t believe we are where we should be. And this becomes troubling because when we look at our communities and believe our best days are behind us and that nobody really wants to live here, it flies in the face of the actual fact that people love it.
People love your communities. People are packed in there right now. They moved in since the 90s.
We’re gonna talk about this. So this became something I wanted to study, which is rural rebound, which is rural renaissance. I know Mike’s on here.
We’ve had a lot of different words for this kind of renaissance of rural over the past 20 years. And really this has been happening since the 70s. It’s not well known.
So we have had a reinvigoration of rural life. In fact, the rural populations went up by 11% since 1970. What’s gone down is the relative percentage of Americans that live in small towns and rural places.
So it used to be that one in four people would live in rural places or small towns, but now it’s like one in six to one in eight, depending upon where you’re at across this country. So it’s not that fewer people live in our rural places. We’re growing.
We’re just not growing as fast as urbanity. So urbanity is growing at a 48% clip and we got 11% clip. So the share of Americans that live in small towns and rural places goes down, but that tends to be the headline.
People prefer urban living is always the headline you see out of this, right? That decline, obviously that means nobody cares about rural. Nobody wants to live there. It’s not true.
We just didn’t grow as fast. Some of our small towns are so desirable. We actually became urbanized, right? So we’re not even gonna get into kind of part and parcel of all this here.
But one of the earliest data points I ran across was that every five years about, depending upon what state you’re in, between 40 to 54% of households in that state move every five years. And that kind of hit me pretty hard early in my career because I think we look a lot at brain drain, right? Which is the health migration of kids. And that tends to be the headline, like the brain drain of rural America, hollowing out the middle type book.
And the implication here is that when your kids leave, there’s nobody left. Well, there are people left after the kids leave. We’ll look at some of this.
So this data point hit me and I really wanted to better understand who then is really moving in and who really is moving out of our rural communities. And then when agriculture became more efficient with a lot more machines, we didn’t need as many people. So until now, I really feel like that our jobs, yes, we’re agricultural based, but not everybody in a small town in a rural area is a farmer.
Not everybody in a small town in a rural area has a touch point with agriculture. Agriculture is still our main bread and butter, but it’s not necessarily something that everybody has to be working in. And you really see that with the internet economy.
Different jobs are available here in rural areas that never were available before. But the 1980s farm crisis was a really big deal around most rural areas. There was a lot less opportunity people felt and a lot of people did not encourage their kids that grew up in the 1980s to move back because it was a very unsure path.
So now that is really something that I’ve noticed. I grew up in this area in the 80s and I graduated in the 90s. It’s nothing I’ve noticed is that that focus has really changed with the ability to do any kind of remote job from here.
And the ability, the fact that it’s really changed our, even how we entertain ourselves. And I’ll go into that in later episodes, but it’s really changed how we think about things and how we do things in a rural area and the opportunities that we can have. So back to Ben a little bit.
Ben is really looks at things from the statistics. Ben Winchester out of the University of Minnesota has really interesting views on different things. And here’s a little bit of what he has to say about that.
Our rural communities. So here’s Grant County, Minnesota. This was literally the first chart I made in Excel.
I had my Excel data book of all the population changes between 1990 and 2000. This was in 2002 when the census data came out in 2002. Have you seen the movie, The Jerk? And when he’s like, the new phone book’s here, the new phone book’s here.
That’s the way all us data people are with the US Census Bureau. So the census came out and we’re like, the new data’s here. And I dug into the data right away.
What this chart reflects is a cohort analysis, which means over the last 10 years, did this cohort of people by age get bigger or did it get smaller? And if the bars go to the right, that means that cohort of people in that age group got bigger and had more people in it. And if the bar went to the left, like here in 20 to 24 year olds, there are fewer people in that cohort. So Grant County, Minnesota, this is Grant County, Minnesota, between 1990 and 2000, if you look at their population between those two time periods, it would be flat or stagnant if you’re a negative narrative person, right? This flat population, but we know people are moving in and out all the time.
There’s a brain drain and we see it. Here is the brain drain. Grant County lost 40% of its young people between 1990 and 2000.
When that cohort of 10 to 14 year olds aged by 10 years and now they’re 20 to 24, 43% of them moved away. That’s the brain drain. We know all about this.
Like literally we have stacks of books and stacks of articles talking about the brain drain and that we’re losing our kids. But on the other hand, I look over here and there’s gains in the thirties, forties and fifties. And there was a consistent pattern across 96% of all the counties in the country of gains in these 30, 40 and 50 year olds.
30 and 40, especially 50 year olds where it’s a little more episodic. And there was also gains, you see down here in 10 to 14 year olds and they don’t move by themselves. They’re coming here with their parents that are 30 to 40 right in there.
So we have had this migration of people moving in. And what happened really, the story of Grant County’s population now is not that they are a stagnant population, it’s that they were able to bring in enough people to make up for the loss of the young people that had moved away. They were able to maintain stability in their community because they are bringing in these people.
So the nineties was really the heyday of this kind of, of this trend of people moving in. But really this started in the seventies. So I would look back on the census data and like literally when I published this in 2002, everybody was like, oh, this is new.
I was like, not really. It’s actually been going around for like since the seventies but we just don’t know about it. Like Economic Research Service did have a study like they had footnotes and kind of little tables on things but there was no real huge study looking at brain gain.
They might’ve been a returnee study that is kids that grew up, moved away and came back but nobody generally looked at all of the people moving in. And it’s actually a different story than if you just thought all the people moving in were the people that grew up, moved away and came back. It’s a very different story.
So when we found out more about who these newcomers were, we did have one question because we really wanted to answer the question about industrial recruitment.
To what extent does industrial recruitment work? I.e. like the industrial recruitment model for migration is that the only reason people are gonna move to your town is if they have a job there, right? Like you offer, you have industrial recruitment, you bring in a big employer and now the employer is gonna offer a job and now people will move here because they have a job. And that’s like, hello, 1940.
We are in a very different world than this now. So we need to explore more of these motivations as to how people make this decision about where they move. So we asked a very specific question.
Before, like, did you have a job or a job offer in hand for a business that existed in your community? And just 41% said that they had a job, they had moved to this community because they had a job or a job offer there. That used to be over 55, 60% when we started doing these like 20 years ago in studies and now it keeps going down and keeps going down. It kind of makes sense.
You know, we have a lot of working home opportunities and things like that. You saw our economy shift to regional economies where we don’t have jobs locally, we’re commuting out. I mean, there’s on the map data too.
And if you look at commuting data, even in Minnesota, I think I’ve got this slide later on and I’ll just tell you it now, like just 51% of Minnesotans work in the county they live in. I think we, again, have an idea that living and working are so tied together in our communities, but they’re not and they haven’t been and they’ve been decoupling for decades in terms of why people make that move. We do have people commuting out all the time.
So anyway, people moving for just a job, the youngest people, the youngest households, it was 50% of those households said they moved because they had a job or a job offer, which makes sense. You’re trying to build your career earlier, but the oldest people in this cohort, up to 60 year olds that we looked at, just 35% of them said they moved because they had a job or a job offer. Other pieces I want to hit on here is the one line right below that is just 21, 25% of the newcomer households have lived there before.
Like initially, we thought that was going to be 75%. Like, right, we hypothesized. We did a bunch of guessing one week before we ever did our surveys decades ago.
We’re like, what percentage is this going to come in at? So our question around, hey, what percentage of these newcomer households were from there, right? They grew up here, they moved away and they came back. They’re returnees. We thought that was going to be 75%.
It came in at 25%. Just 25% of newcomer households are from the community they’re moving to. There are constantly newcomer households that are not from there, but they’re not seen all the time too.
So like, hey, you know, Josh, you move back, your son moves back. Like, hey, your son moved back. Your recognizable face, your recognizable last name.
Like, you have access to social capital and networks and like all these things. But I’ll remind you that every time there’s a newcomer household that you recognize and that is from there, there’s three other newcomer households that are not from there. And what kind of an experience do they have when they move to your community? Who do they, do they have access to emergency daycare? Do they even know anybody in town? Who do they have access to? So this becomes a big welcoming question, right? I mean, it just raises a bunch of questions.
One other piece I want to hit on here, we’re going to share this PowerPoint with you. So one other piece I want to hit on is just 47% of the newcomer households had kids. We thought that was going to be up to be 70 to 80% too.
Like, you know, households moving into rural communities are going to be raising their kids here. Well, every time there’s a newcomer household with kids, there’s another newcomer household without kids. And again, like the returnees that are easier to see because they’re recognizable, the people with children are easier to see, the newcomer households, right? It’s like, oh, there’s a new kid in my kid’s class and there’s their parents right there.
Like, it’s easy to see them. Every time there’s an easy to see household, there’s a hard to see household. We liked how Ben Winchester uses those statistics and really talks about rural in a very positive way.
So one of our rock stars, the second rock star that we talk about that we really follow in our rural economic development work is Ben Winchester. So last episode, we talked about Marci Penner. This episode, we talked about Ben Winchester and we encourage you to go and research both of those people.
We’ll put some of their information on how to contact them and research them below in the comments. Make sure if you found this episode interesting, we’d love to hear who your rock star is from your area and who kind of has inspired you to be more positive about your rural area. Please drop that in the comments below.
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