Rural areas still have fewer jobs than 13 years ago; federal program for regional coalitions isn't very rural-centric

Rural employment has not recovered to the levels of the Great Recession, which ended over 13 years ago, while metropolitan areas have made steady gains. To help rural areas, they were targeted by an Economic Development Administration grant program that funded 21 regional coalitions. But only three of the 21 regional coalitions are both rural-centric and rural-led, report Anthony F. Pipa and Zoe Swarzenski of the Brookings Institution.

The EDA's financial awards flowed through the $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge, which is aimed at creating rural opportunities by leveraging regional collaboration, Pipa and Swarzenski write. "Yet formulating a regional cluster approach that is effective in benefiting rural places requires sensitivity to a complex set of dynamics. Almost by definition, a focus on industry clusters puts metropolitan areas at the center. . . . EDA acknowledged that clusters are likely to follow a traditional hub-and-spoke model, where a metro area acts as a central hub for a coalition that reaches into or engages other communities."

The regional model does not lend itself to inherently rural challenges, they write: "Rural places are often less than full partners in regional coalitions; intentional interventions to meet their unique challenges related to governance capacity, distance, workforce, and access to capital are frequently necessary to enable them to receive proportionate benefits. Program parameters can also play a role. Matching funds requirements, for example, immediately place a substantial burden on rural and tribal places, which often have less fiscal buffer and less access to outside resources."

The Build Back Better Regional Challenge gave five-year grants of $25 million to $65 million to 21 regional coalitions, after choosing 60 finalists from 529 initial applications. "To better understand the extent to which rural areas were included among the 60 finalists that received $500,000 planning awards, we experimented with different quantitative approaches, which yielded very different impressions of the level of rurality," Pipa and Swarzenski report. When rural areas applied using a "'Rural County Share' where each applicant used a defined geographic service area that would benefit from the proposed strategy, 11 became awardees—more than half of the final set of successful applicants. . . But when 'Rural Population Share' was used to measure the proportion of rural people served, only two became awardees, less than 10 percent of the final set of awardees."

Pipa and Swarzenshi divided the pool of applicants into three major categories, defined as Rural-Led, Rural-Centered, Metro-Led, Rural-Relevant, and Metro-Led, Metro-Centered. They report, "While a laudable number of applicants cast a wide net and included rural places in their geographic service areas, the density of population in the urban areas serving as hubs for their regional coalitions suggests a strong magnetic pull that creates a nexus of political attention, leadership, decisionmaking, and beneficiaries."

Their recommendations for the EDA "to help advance the equitable participation and integration of rural places into future efforts to incentivize and support regional strategies include "incorporating rural expertise and qualitative analysis to assess rural relevance, establishing rural set-asides or preferences, Modifying program design to promote innovative practices incorporating rural places, increasing transparency about the participation of rural places."