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Journal Article
New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Journal Article
Upfront: New from the Richmond Fed's Regional Matters Blog
New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Discussion Paper
Shifting Rurality: Is it Possible to Increase Population and Become More Rural?
In January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS) released the 2023 update of the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCCs), resulting in changes for many counties, including those in the Fifth District. The USDA-ERS developed the nine-code classification system in 1974 to identify a county's level of rurality based on its degree of urbanization and adjacency to a metro area: RUCC 1 is the least rural, and RUCC 9 is the most rural. Following each decennial census, the USDA-ERS does a full update of the RUCCs to reflect population and metro/nonmetro area changes. ...
Discussion Paper
Mapping Outcomes Across Rural and Urban Communities
How different are economic outcomes across rural and urban communities? What factors are at the heart of these differences? This year, we've been building our data products to help data users and local and state leaders gain quick insight into geographic differences across a range of indicators. This Regional Matters post presents several of the rural-urban comparison maps we've created, along with complementary data visualizations. We focus specifically on rural-urban differences in employment and educational attainment to highlight how these visualizations can be used.
Discussion Paper
Shifting Populations: Results From 2021 Census Estimates
When the COVID-19 pandemic first began in the United States in 2020, many workers started working full time from home. The expansion of remote work allowed a growing number of people to see a future in which where they worked and where they lived did not have to be one in the same. As workers became less tethered to their offices in big cities, stories emerged, including from our own outreach, of workers moving away from urban cores in favor of more rural areas. But do the stories align with what the data tell us?
Briefing
Aging and declining populations in northern New England: is there a role for immigration?
In hundreds of communities across northern New England, the population is aging rapidly and becoming smaller. The entire country is aging, but northern New England stands out: Among the populations of all US states, those of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have the top-three highest median ages, respectively. The situation is even more extreme in northern New England?s rural counties, where the populations of the smallest towns generally are substantially older than those of the rest of the region. These communities also have seen the slowest, or even negative, population growth over the ...
Briefing
Commuting Patterns and Characteristics of Fifth District Counties
This article extends our previous work on the categorization of counties in the Fifth District based on their economic connectivity. Using commuting patterns to proxy for connectivity, we group counties into four categories. We next compare our classification with the USDA/ERS RUCC classification system. Finally, we characterize each category using different socioeconomic indicators. We claim that the information conveyed by this study is relevant when designing regionally targeted policies.
Working Paper
The Pitfalls of Using Location Quotients to Identify Clusters and Represent Industry Specialization in Small Regions
This paper examines the use of location quotients, a measure of regional business activity relative to the national benchmark, as an indicator of sectoral agglomeration in small cities and towns, and as a measure of industry specialization that might impact the number of new business startups in these places. Using establishment-level data on businesses located in Maine, our findings suggest that the addition of one "hypothetical" establishment in very small towns leads to a dramatic change in the magnitude of the region-industry location quotient. At population sizes of about 4,100 or more ...
Discussion Paper
From Good Bones to Healthy Homes: Housing Quality in the Rural Fifth District
We've previously explored how rural Fifth District households encounter housing affordability challenges, finding low-to-moderate income (LMI) households to be at greatest risk. A home's quality can also profoundly affect residents' well-being. Resolving housing quality issues caused by repair needs can be quite costly. If left unaddressed, housing quality issues can lead to stress or chronic illness, which in turn can hurt adults' workforce activity and children's educational outcomes. As with affordability, not all households are equally likely to face housing quality challenges. In the ...
Working Paper
Rural Affordable Rental Housing : Quantifying Need, Reviewing Recent Federal Support, and Assessing the Use of Low Income Housing Tax Credits in Rural Areas
Recently, there has been significant interest in the high levels of rental cost burden being experienced across the United States. Much of this scholarship has focused on rental cost burdens in larger urban areas, or at the national level, and has not explored differences in the prevalence of rental cost burden in urban versus rural communities. In this paper, I find that rental cost burdens are a challenge facing both urban and rural communities. However, despite the need for affordable rental housing in rural communities identified, I find the amount of resources made available by the ...