Rural Shrink Smart Findings and Implications for our churches
In the RMI cohorts we have been sharing various ways of listening to God, to each other, and to our neighbors and over the summer we listened to some of Iowa State University’s research from the Rural Shrink Smart initiative as part of the environment that our diocese exists in.
Iowa State University’s Rural Shrink Smart Initiative, was a 7+ year research project funded by the National Science Foundation to study small and shrinking rural communities in Iowa that have been able to protect or improve quality of life and community services for their residents even as they lose population.
Their findings hold some really critical and useful things for all of our churches across Iowa from the ones in our rural and small communities to our ones in micropolitan and metropolitan cities.
The prophet Jeremiah told the people, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29:7) - that’s a central foundational lens for the work we are doing together - how is God calling us to serve the cities where our churches are located - to seek the welfare of the people and the town. And one of the essential questions we are exploring through our RMI grant is this - How can our faith communities, working alongside others, seek the welfare of the city and sustain a thriving and vibrant community in the midst of depopulation realities in Iowa?
POPULATION LOSS IN IOWA
Our friends at Iowa State had actually been collecting data on small towns across Iowa for decades before this project through the Iowa Small Towns Project. They remind us that Iowa was built around an economic reality that no longer exists - small family farms with lots of children, (that used to fill our Sunday School classrooms) and the all of the infrastructure that grew up in the towns across the state to support that… And that reality is never coming back.
Commercial farms now drive Iowa’s agriculture. Iowa’s 21,410 commercial operations make up 24.8% of farms but operate 65% of farmland acres and generate 77% of sales, more than any other state. Farm concentration has eliminated many family farms that once provided middle-income employment opportunities in rural America.
As of 2023, just about 60% of Iowa’s farms are now places to live and not place to make a living, operated by people that have a non-farm job (47%) or who are retired (11.8%)
Just as with manufacturing decline across the US, what replaced family farm employment were lower-wage service sector or farm labor jobs and meat packing jobs. And it remains to be seen what effect the tariffs and reductions in USAID and the resulting reduction in exports will have on farming in Iowa. An escalating trade war with China and other nations may result in import bans and retaliatory tariffs, which would heavily impact soybean and hog producers who depend on exports.
The researchers also point out that Iowa has way too many small towns for our population size. 940 in 2023 -astonishingly, 1 out of every 15 towns in the whole US are in Iowa - way too many for our population.
The smallest city is now 11 in 2024 in LeRoy (Decatur county, South Central Iowa. 50% of our towns have fewer than 500 residents. And across the Midwest, many nonmetropolitan places have experienced decline in terms of shrinking populations, exodus of younger people, job losses, and poorer community services.
Almost all of our small towns across Iowa are losing population. While population losses slowed due to fewer people migrating out of small towns and cities during the pandemic, rural areas continue to shrink overall as deaths far exceed births. Rural communities have been experiencing changes associated with depopulation since at least the 1980s farm crisis, yet concern is increasing among researchers and the public that the on-going failure to address underlying structural questions about the future of rural places is hitting a crisis point.
COVID EFFEECTS
Rural Iowa had far more COVID-19 deaths than other rural places in the U.S. Rural counties in Iowa with towns of 2,500 or more suffered 270 deaths per 100,000, higher than the national rate of only 225 deaths. In completely rural counties (no town over 2,500) mortality was 290 per 100,000 in Iowa, far above the 210 death rate in other states.
In short, the pandemic was far worse in rural Iowa than it was in either metro Iowa or other parts of rural America. In addition to the impact on physical health, the pandemic also took a major toll on mental and social well-being in small towns in Iowa.
Nearly 40 percent said their mental health and relationships with close friends and family became much worse. About 20 percent showed signs of depression and 15 percent signs of anxiety. COVID has also made rural Iowans worse off financially. About 30 percent had their working hours reduced, close to 20 percent had to use their savings to make ends meet, and around 10 percent lost their job or were unable to pay their bills due to COVID.
AGING
Rural Iowa is significantly affected by demographic aging. Older adults in Iowa’s rural communities are ‘aging in place’ and represent an increasing part of the rural population
Iowans over 65 make up almost 20% of Iowa’s whole population. However, the rural areas continue to have a higher percentage of older adults than Iowa’s metropolitan areas. In short, the entire state is aging but in different ways: non-metro Iowa is aging and shrinking, while metro Iowa is aging and growing. Rural Iowa also continues to lose school age children and working-age adults as workplaces and schools close.
In many cases, our shrinking and aging churches also reflect the external reality around us.
GOOD NEWS
In rural and micropolitan Iowa, populations would have shrunk more if it were not for population gains of people of color. In micropolitan areas, gains in Hispanic and Asian populations helped off-set and slowed population loss. And central metro populations boomed due to people of color, accounting for 2/3 of the growth over the last decade. In short, non-metro Iowa is both shrinking and diversifying at the same time, with people of color the only growing segment of the rural population.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, transformations in the physical and social infrastructure of America, particularly in farming, but also in local manufacturing, have meant a loss of population in rural areas in Iowa, as well as in the rest of the country (Peters 2013). This combined with demographic aging leads to new pressing challenges—how to preserve a good quality of life in aging and shrinking communities.
RURAL SHRINK SMART
Iowa State knew from the data they had collected for decades in the Iowa Small Town Poll that while many small and rural places are shrinking, that this was not the only story to tell. They could see that some communities were continuing to thrive as they lost population because they adapted and stayed focused on quality of life, community services, and investing in the future. This is what they came to call rural smart shrinkage.
So Iowa State’s goal in this project was to to develop tools to help all small and shrinking communities actively plan for shrinkage before population loss affects their quality of life.
To do this, they started with their data from the Iowa Small Town Poll, that had collected quality-of-life data in ninety-nine Iowa communities since 1994. They identified a group of shrinking communities from among the poll towns that scored higher than average on quality-of-life indicators from the 1994, 2004, and 2014 polls and they studied those communities using qualitative and quantitative methods to learn what makes them great places to live in the opinions of the residents - despite the declining population.
The team has met over the years of the project with community members and local leaders in city halls, libraries, community centers, and restaurants for extended conversations. They held one-on-one interviews and group meetings with community members, made site visits, mapped community networks, and collected, analyzed, and visualized data using machine learning and other data science methods to better understand what influences people’s perceptions of quality of life in small and rural places.
QUALITY OF LIFE INDICATORS
Recent findings suggest the greatest challenges facing shrinking places is maintaining essential services and retaining investments in businesses and infrastructure. Depopulation erodes community services and curtails investment, which in turn leads to further out-migration due not only to economic factors alone but also to poorer quality of life. A number of sociologists have documented the primacy of quality-of-life factors over economic ones in peoples’ decisions to leave rural and small communities.
As they define it, community QoL is an index averaging these measurements
quality of jobs
medical services
public schools
housing
local government services (like recreation centers, etc)
childcare services
senior services
retail options
entertainment
PRIMARY RECOMMENDATIONS
What they learned from shrinking towns who had been able to improve their town’s QoL and thus slow the rate of people leaving led to these primary recommendations for other towns that want to do the same:
1. enhance social capital
2. increase civic engagement, and
3. create a culture of openness and support.
They recommend those first because they are inexpensive to implement, actionable in the near-term, and success does not depend on outside socioeconomic or political forces. In short, it is within the community’s power to achieve these recommendations.
In our next post we’ll look at those recommendations and what role our churches could play.
Sources:
“Community Resiliency in Declining Small Towns: Impact of Population Loss on Quality of Life over 20 Years*. Rural Sociology 84(4), 2019, pp. 635–668
“Using entrepreneurial social infrastructure to understand smart shrinkage in
small towns”. Journal of Rural Studies 64 (2018) 39–49
“Rural Iowa at a glance”. https://smalltowns.soc.iastate.edu/rural-iowa-at-a-glance/
Shrink-Smart Small Towns: Communities Can Still Thrive as they Lose Population. 2017. Peters D, Fisher H, Zarecor K. ISU Extension: SOC3083.
Population Trends by Race and Ethnicity: Findings from the 2020 Census. 2021. Peters, D. ISU Extension: SOC3098.
“In Iowa, Small Towns With Declining Populations Learn To ‘Shrink Smart’.” Here and Now, National Public Radio, aired 12/16/2019.
“Impact of COVID-19 in Iowa’s Small Towns”. Peters, Novak, & Berg (2021). SOC 3100, ISU Extension.