NC State University News ServicesCampus Box 7504Raleigh, NC 27695-7504[email protected]http://www.ncsu.edu/news
NEWS RELEASE
Media Contacts:Dr. Mitch Renkow, 919/515-5179 or [email protected]Kevin Potter, NC State News Services, 919/515-3470 or [email protected]
Oct. 24, 2000
NC State Economist: Population Growth May Not Benefit Rural Areas
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Throughout the United States, people are moving in great numbers to rural counties near urban centers. An economist at North Carolina State University has found that, in North Carolina at least, that trend could be more of a drain than a benefit to those rural areas.
Dr. Mitch Renkow, associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at NC State, arrived at that conclusion after analyzing migration and commuter trends to and from 43 rural counties that ring major North Carolina population centers. As the number of people moving to those counties has increased since 1960, so has the number of people leaving the counties to work, Renkow says.
In 1990, for example, 18 percent of workers in rural counties adjacent to urban centers traveled to those urban counties to work, compared to only 7 percent in 1960.
"We found very strong link between out-commuting and in-migration," Renkow explains. "Are they moving into rural counties because there are jobs there, or are they moving there because they want to live there and work elsewhere? The evidence seems to point to the latter."
Since the 1970s, the population of rural areas in North Carolina and many other states has grown steadily; between 1990 and 1999 alone, 250,000 people moved to North Carolina's rural counties. The reason for that trend -- a reversal of many decades of migration from rural to urban areas -- has been a source of debate among economists, demographers and other social scientists.
Some social scientists argue that the change is caused by a "rural renaissance" -- a reinvigoration of the economies of rural areas. Such an improvement, they say, has resulted from a shift in the national economy away from the industrial sector to service-sector jobs, and from an increase in telecommunication technologies that allow businesses to locate outside urban centers.
Renkow's findings seem to boost an alternative view: That people are moving to rural counties because of the clean air, low crime, open spaces and scenic vistas those areas offer. "There may be a 'rural renaissance' in some areas, but, on balance, it seems that people move to get out of the city," he says.
His findings are bolstered by the fact that 85 percent of the people moving to rural North Carolina in the last decade settled in counties adjacent to urban counties. Meanwhile, several counties heavily dependent on agriculture -- especially in eastern North Carolina -- have experienced out-migration in at least one of the last three decades. Additionally, older people have made up an increasing share of migrants to relatively remote rural mountain and coastal counties that are popular retirement locations.
Two major factors have facilitated the rural-to-urban commuting trend, Renkow explains: better roads and greater affluence, which allow people to live in Johnston or Chatham counties and commute to Raleigh, or to live in Iredell or Union counties and drive each day to Charlotte.
"It used to be you had to live near where you work. But it's gotten cheaper to travel, and as people become more well-off, they can afford to move," he says.
That's both a positive and a negative proposition for rural counties where population has grown: The good news is that new residents in those areas bring new demands for the services offered by grocery stores, restaurants, dry cleaners and the like. The bad news is that more people also create more demand for expensive government services such as schools, trash collection, and water and sewer infrastructure, which can raise taxes and impact the cost of living.
"If a county becomes a 'bedroom community' where people who work in the city live, the character of the county changes, and there are often social growing pains, or stresses, and clashes of culture," Renkow says. "The people who bear the biggest brunt are the people who have lived there for a while, because their equilibrium is disturbed."
Some rural counties are beginning to take some steps to directly limit, or at least modify, residential growth through zoning or infrastructure planning. "You're starting to hear a lot of counties talking about that, and that might be the strongest evidence of how significant these changes are," Renkow says, noting that North Carolinians have traditionally not favored being told what they can or cannot do with their land.
He adds, however, that local governments may be fairly limited in what they can do. "These are pretty profound changes. If you get in the way, you're likely to be run over by the steamroller," he says. "In economics, there's rarely a situation where everybody wins."
-- potter --
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