Census irony
One of the takeaways of the recently released Census data is that urban areas are grow- ing in population and rural areas are shrinking. That’s true nationally, and in Arkansas.
It’s also surprising to nobody. The question was never whether smaller Arkansas counties and cities would lose population in the 2020 count, but only how many and how much.
Most locals could sense the trends. Residents of and visitors to Fayetteville or Jonesboro could tell those areas were growing. Likewise, people living in or driving through Delta counties like Mississippi or Phillips could discern the dread of dwindling loss.
The official Census 2020 report confirmed and quantified those intuitions. Two out of three Arkansas counties (53 of 75) lost population since 2010. Expand the rear view, and several counties retain half or less of what they had generations ago.
Mississippi County’s 2020 population of 40,685 is half of the 82,375 number counted in the 1980 census, and the smallest since 1920 when 47,320 people called it home.
Phillips County is smaller in population now than in 1880, and at 16,568 is barely a third of what it was in 1950. The same is true of a slew of rural counties whose population is now smaller than since the late 19th or early 20th century.
Indeed, the great irony of urban migration is that high-population-density cities continue to grow despite their dismal quality-of-life statistics. Chicago, for example, has been a national leader in weekend shootings all summer, and a gun-crime mecca all decade, but still grew since 2010 by almost as many people as the whole state of Arkansas did.
Fewer than one in three Chicago city school district students scores proficient in math or English language arts. Even in the worst Chicago neighborhoods, the median home price is more (in some cases a lot more) than that in most of Arkansas’ counties.
Despite all that, people keep piling into Cook County where the population density is already an astonishing 5,583 people per square mile. For comparison, that’s 10 times the highest-density county in Arkansas (Pulaski, with 526 per square mile) and 100 times the Arkansas average.
People moving into cities do so for opportunity. But how many poor people in Chicago and other cities with huge packed-in populations stay because they feel trapped?
The high-crime areas in Chicago are like war zones; the worst schools are atrocious and have abysmal test scores; high cost of urban living, low wages and few job opportunities perpetuate poverty. Hope can be hard to find amid such daily strife, and even harder to pursue.
Oftentimes federal program funds that flow into high-poverty urban areas only serve to sustain a cycle of dependence and despair. Environments of subsidized housing, SNAP benefits, rampant drugs, crime-ridden streets and failing schools grow more costly over time, but never change.
Surely some inner-city Chicagoans would leap at the opportunity to start a new life in a small rural town, where their kids would have the chance to get away from gangs and graduate from school and go to college. Where shootings rarely occur, and there are more churches than liquor stores, and the cost of living is unimaginably affordable in contrast.
What if there were a modern equivalent of the old Homestead Act that re-channeled government welfare funding into a program that offered metro inner-city residents below a certain income level an opportunity to relocate to a rural county suffering a population decrease above a certain level?
The original Homestead Act opened up western public acreage to citizens willing to settle and farm the land. Applicants had to reside on 160-acre tracts for five years, and improve the land sufficiently to complete the deed-ownership process in seven years.
It was a revolutionary idea that capitalized on the pioneering American spirit and proved enormously successful. Between 1862 and 1934, more than 1.6 million homestead applications were granted to citizens (including women) for 270 million acres of work-to-own land.
If we imagined a “Fresh Start Homestead Act” today, it could remedy the dual maladies: Poor households trapped in toxic urban environments could get an escape opportunity, and rural communities in decline could get a population growth stimulus.
Not everybody offered resettlement to some place in the sticks would jump aboard, but many would seize the opportunity with the vigor of the yeoman spirit idealized by Jefferson.
A vitalizing new start for a generation of previously impoverished urban single moms and families would also be a breath of fresh air to small towns on the brink. The government’s investment of dwelling property would come at bottom-dollar prices in depressed rural markets, and could be coordinated with local economic development and workforce improvement efforts and programs.
Fresh Start transplants could learn new skills, appreciate simpler rural life, and discover new joys among the fields and streams and lakes that native dwellers in low-population-density states take for granted.
Their energy, appreciation and self-determination to build a better life could prove contagious in communities struggling against population loss and economic challenges. And that’d be a truly transformative win-win.