Recessions caused the South, the most rural region, to lose the near-parity it had gained

Thanks in large measure to two recessions in less than 10 years, America's region with the highest percentage of rural population "ended the decade with three discernable patterns of distress: rural counties with persistent poverty, metropolitan areas with a growing population of poor or near-poor people, and manufacturing locales burdened with massive job losses." So says the first chapter of The State of the South 2010, a project a project of MDC Inc., a nonprofit based in Chapel Hill, N.C., that focuses on removing the barriers that separate people from education, jobs and opportunity, particularly in the South.

"The gap between the metro South and the rural South continues to widen. The South added 20.2 million jobs between 1987 and 2007, and nearly nine out of 10 jobs gained were located in metropolitan areas," the report says, citing Daily Yonder research showing that "Unemployment rates in rural counties have generally exceeded rates in urban and exurban counties (outer-ring suburbs) in the South."

The recession "knocked the South off an upward trajectory that had broadened the middle class and nearly closed the poverty gaps that perennially separated it from the rest of the country," MDC said in a news release, "Getting back on track will not be easy. The report points out that the millions of low-skill, low-wage jobs lost in manufacturing probably have disappeared for good, so the South will have to put itself on a new track, creating jobs that pay a middle-class wage or better." The report says the track should be guided by "ideas that emerge from civic discussions and purposeful, organized thinking that looks beyond current difficulties and addresses the inequities and disparities that will hold people back even when the current low economic tide rises again.” Future chapters of the report will examine five possible transformative strategies for a comeback.

The report is mainly about economics, but also has a dose of politics, as might be expected from our friend Ferrel Guillory, a former North Carolina political writer who teaches at the University of North Carolina and as the senior fellow at MDC is chief author of the report. It says 2008 "provided evidence of a South going in different directions. Eight years ago, Republican George W. Bush of Texas won the electoral votes from every Southern state defeating his Democratic opponent, Al Gore of Tennessee. Then, in 2008, Democrat Barack Obama won three Southern states; in becoming the nation’s first black president, he won the electoral votes of North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, which had once seceded from the union in an effort to sustain slavery. County-level results show that the Democratic president won in the region’s major metropolitan areas, as well as communities with large black populations in the Mississippi Delta and the Black Belt. Meanwhile, Republican John McCain received a stronger vote than Bush had four years earlier in smaller cities and rural counties of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana."

To read or download a PDF of the report's 27-page first chapter, click here.