Even before the financial crisis, it was hard to argue that rural America was not already in economic distress. Rural communities have higher poverty and unemployment rates than other metropolitan areas and the rural communities have higher incidents of substandard housing and rent overburden. Virtually every community in the country with inadequate drinking water has a population of 3300 or less.
Poverty rates are higher in rural America than they are in the cities. Only one in 20 urban counties has a poverty rate above 20 percent. For remote rural counties, the ratio is one in five. The counties that have been poor over a period of decades are overwhelmingly rural, writes There are approximately 250 consistently poor counties in the United States; 244 of those are rural.
A disproportionate amount of the nation’s substandard housing is located in rural areas. Of the approximate 106 million occupied housing units available in the United States according to the 2000 Census, 18.7 million units or 17.7% if of the occupied units are located in non-metropolitan counties. The Economic Research Service recently released updated typologies for the Nation’s counties. The classification includes a new typology which identifies 15 percent of non-metropolitan counties as housing stressed. In these counties, 30 percent or more of homes are considered too costly relative to household incomes, are too crowded, or lack certain basic facilities, such as a complete kitchen or bathroom. Also according to the Economic Research Service, some 4 million rural families live in “housing poverty”, a multidimensional indicator that combines measures of economic need, housing quality, and neighborhood quality. The 2000 Census revealed that 5.5 million people, one-quarter of the non-metro population, face cost overburden and 1.6 million non-metro housing units are either moderately or severely substandard.
Since 2008 the mortgage crisis is one of the issues that we have seen again and again in the news headlines. While the media has concentrated their stories and reports in major metropolitan areas, rural America has also been hard hit. Approximately 10 percent of all non-metropolitan mortgages, twice the proportion of metropolitan loans, have an interest rate of 10 percent or more. According to the Federal Reserve loan performance data 473 out of the 588 micropolitan areas have delinquency rates of 15%; 202 of them have foreclosure rates of 8% or higher; 135 of them have subprime rates of at least 35%; and there is a total of 60,497 delinquent loans.