Brookings paper: Viewing America as rural vs. urban is inaccurate, and has real consequences for rural places

Viewing America as a rural-urban binary is not only inaccurate, it has real consequences for rural places, Hannah Love and Tracy Hadden Loh write for the Brookings Institution. The consequences can be split into four major categories, they write. Love is a senior research analyst at Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program. Loh is fellow at the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking.

"First, it prioritizes the political concerns of an imagined, white rural monolith and erases the needs of rural people of color during a pandemic which is disproportionately devastating rural Black, Latino or Hispanic, and Native American communities.

"Second, it furthers misconceptions about rural economies which devalue the role of rural places in American (and urban) prosperity.

"Third, it propagates a myth of place-based poverty that erases people living in a range of high-poverty geographies, justifying oversimplified antipoverty policies.

"And finally, the binary-based narrative obscures effective policy and practice solutions for rural economic development that embrace the interdependence of rural and urban economic futures." Read more here.