Major towns in Arkansas' part of the Mississippi Delta fight to reverse decline, demonstrated by loss of population

Partial map of Arkansas shows the Mississippi Delta in brown.

The Mississippi Delta is a place of poverty, poor health and other problems, often given short shrift by news media that serve the region. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette took a look Monday at the state's part of the Delta, through two large towns, Blytheville and Pine Bluff, after a broader story Sunday.

"Poverty, population loss, abandonment and crime are issues that affect the rural parts of the Delta, but some urban parts of the region have also suffered from those things," Stephen Simpson reports. "At its peak, Blytheville’s population was nearly 25,000 in the 1970 census, but by 2020, the number of people had dropped to close to 13,000. . . . From the 1970 to 1990 censuses, Pine Bluff had a population of about 57,000, but as of the 2020 census, the population has declined to a little more than 41,000."

Blytheville has lost several major employers in the last 30 years, most notably the Air Force base that closed in 1992. "Local government officials and businesses turned their sights into making Mississippi County the steel capital of the state," Simpson reports, quoting Cliff Chitwood, Mississippi County’s economic development director: “We played our part in bringing 4,000 jobs to Mississippi County, but 4,000 is not 8,000.” And not all those folks have moved to the county.

"Steel-mill jobs pay so well that [they] attract people from far away," Simpson reports, citing Chitwood: “The job is a four-days-on and four-days-off type of business, so people are coming here from Little Rock and Fayetteville, staying in their fancy trailers while working here and then going back . . . It wasn’t because people didn’t like it here. It wasn’t because we didn’t have the amenities.”

In Pine Bluff, which is near Little Rock and overlooks the Delta, drugs, crime and poor health have contributed to decline. Now health officials are worried that depression is a major health risk in the area. “You need a healthy economy to have healthy people and you need healthy people to have a healthy economy,” Dr. Brookshield Laurent, the executive director for the Delta Population Health Institute, told Simpson. “If you don’t have opportunities for jobs in the workforce then people will leave and there will be a disinvestment in the communities.”