While some high-amenity rural towns have seen a boom during Covid, under-resourced communities continue to struggle

Jess Carson, from the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy, is studying the ways that the pandemic affected communities in Northern New England. (Courtesy photo)

For most of his life, Doug Ramsey, editor of the Journal of Rural and Community Development, planned to retire to the small Ontario town where he grew up. Suddenly, that doesn’t seem feasible.

“Unless something changes, we will not be able to afford to retire in my home county,” says Ramsey, a professor in the Department of Rural Development at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada.

Ramsey’s sister still lives on family property in their hometown of Waterford, which lies about 90 miles southwest of Toronto. Her property used to be a tobacco farm, but 15 years ago, she converted it into a golf course. The year 2020, with its deluge of people looking for outdoor activities, was a record-setting year for the course; so was 2021. When Ramsey returned to town this summer, a new brewery and a fancy bakery had replaced the hardware store. Changes that had been slowly happening for more than a decade seemed solidified.

“It’s changed everything,” Ramsey notes. “Some people might appreciate the brewpub, but they also liked when the hardware store sold things they needed for the farm.”

In the past year, there’s been a prevalent narrative about urban dwellers fleeing to rural towns. Emerging data show the full picture is more nuanced, but there’s no doubt that the pandemic has laid bare challenges that rural towns were already grappling with. Some are struggling to maintain their identity amid an influx of new arrivals, while others are trying to keep their workforce competitive in the digital age. Many experts feel that the story of the pandemic’s impact on rural America is far from over.

“There’s still a lot that’s unknown about how the pandemic is going to finally wrap up, and when it does — if it does — how we’re all going to be able to rebuild in the ways we need to see our communities thrive,” says Jess Carson, a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.

Urban flight?

Many rural residents saw more out-ofstate license plates in the early pandemic and watched with interest as property prices ballooned. But this may not indicate a fundamental shift in where Americans live.

“I’m cautious about the extent of reverse migration from urban to rural areas,” says Tim Marema, editor of The Daily Yonder, a national publication covering rural America.

“The housing market is tight everywhere, so housing sales figures alone don’t indicate migration.”

Data on migration patterns is hard to come by so soon after the start of the pandemic, but the early numbers suggest that there wasn’t a massive exodus to rural towns. A February 2021 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that the net migration out of urban neighborhoods doubled in 2020, compared to 2017-19.

However, the report found that most of the net loss was explained by fewer people moving into cities, not more people moving from them. Bloomberg’s City Lab found little evidence for large-scale migration to rural areas.

Much of the migration to rural America has been to high-amenity towns: those that already attract tourists and have a second home and short-term rental market. Towns that have seen their population and property values soar — like Joshua Tree, California or Bozeman, Mont. — are anomalies.

“There’s been a lot of coverage of towns like Bozeman, but there are a lot of rural places like Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta that aren’t necessarily seeing the same kind of population boom,” says Samantha Booth, government relations manager for the Housing Assistance Council, a national nonprofit focused on affordable housing in rural areas.

Booth and her husband moved from Washington D.C. to Bozeman, Booth’s hometown, during the spring of 2020. They had always considered returning, but the pandemic gave them the push they needed. Booth, 30, purchased a townhouse just before Bozeman property prices ballooned, rising 50% between April 2020 and April 2021. Now, she’s seeing her classmates from Bozeman priced out of the market.

“They can’t afford houses here,” she says. “Any town that sees that rapid growth in such a short period of time is going to feel the crunch a bit.”

Affordable housing was an issue for rural communities even before the pandemic. A 2015 report found that 47% of rural renters paid more than one-third of their income toward rent. An influx of new residents can push native residents to more affordable areas outside of the town they work in, says Ramsey.

“This has been happening for a long time, and Covid is another driver,” he says.

One way to promote affordable housing is by easing regulatory restrictions (like requiring a certain number of parking spots) and requiring developers to allot a certain percentage of new units to affordable housing. However, a Montana law now prohibits this inclusionary zoning, so that particular solution is off the table in Bozeman. Federal programs like those run by the USDA can help rural people afford property, Booth says. She would like to see those programs expanded.

“There’s a big federal discussion around infrastructure, but you can make the argument that housing should be considered as infrastructure too,” she says. “You can build as many roads and sewers as you like, but if there isn’t an affordable house at the end of that road, what is the purpose of infrastructure to begin with?”

Hope for the future

The influx of new residents has made it difficult for cities to determine how much infrastructure towns need amid uncertainty over who will be staying once the pandemic resolves.

“You go from, ‘how do we keep our school open,’ to ‘now we have so many kids from urban families with a lot more demands,’” says Ramsey.

That’s left some residents in Bozeman hoping the transplants will return to the city.

“A lot of the locals like to joke that maybe we’ll have a really bad winter and they’ll get scared off,” Booth says.

While high-amenity communities navigate a surge in new residents, under-resourced rural communities are grappling with the same issues they were before the pandemic, including access to capital, services like child care and a skilled workforce.

Since many of these communities never recovered economically from the Great Recession in 2008, they had less of a safety net to handle the economic blow of the pandemic, Booth notes.

Underserved rural communities might only have one bank or one day care center. If that business goes under, it can leave an unmet need in the community and make the loss more pronounced. Child care, for example, was already a challenge pre-pandemic, and the industry has been hard-hit in the past year, says Carson, who is studying the effects of Covid on Northern New England communities.

“Having fewer child care options is never good,” she says. “But when you live in a rural place and have fewer options to begin with, that’s really not good.”

The pandemic has also sent more jobs online, and rural communities must invest in reliable broadband so that rural workers can be competitive.

“We have to allow them to work in the same ways that are available to other people and places so that rural workers aren’t left behind,” Carson says.

In both booming and languishing rural communities, the pandemic has created tension over plans for the future. Ideally, transplants to a rural area invest their time and resources in the local community, but this can’t be allowed to overshadow the priorities of the people who are native to the town.

“We don’t want to upend the character of a place,” Carson says.

Although the influx of urban people to rural areas isn’t as pronounced as the outlying cases make it seem, Marema believes the conversation itself is beneficial.

“Even the perception that people are moving to smaller towns in rural areas means that these places are getting more attention,” he says. “There’s a buzz about it. I think that’s a great thing.”

This article is being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.