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Evictions are commonplace in the United States, and their negative consequences are broad and severe. However, research on evictions to date has focused primarily on urban areas, and thus has not addressed the impact evictions have on rural renters. This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of evictions in rural communities, where the number of renters has been increasing in recent decades. We use Eviction Lab's national eviction database to study the approximately 220,000 evictions filed in rural counties each year. While the majority of rural evictions affect families with a white head of household (57 percent in 2010), eviction filing rates are four times higher among rural Black renters than among rural white renters. Eviction filing rates are highest in heavily Black counties in the rural southeast. While eviction filings are somewhat lower in rural majority‐Hispanic counties, these communities experience low‐quality informal housing and overcrowding. Eviction rates are also higher in rural counties with higher rent burdens and where more households include children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evictions are commonplace in the United States, and their negative consequences are broad and severe. However, research on evictions to date has focused primarily on urban areas, and thus has not addressed the impact evictions have on rural renters. This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of evictions in rural communities, where the number of renters has been increasing in recent decades. We use Eviction Lab's national eviction database to study the approximately 220,000 evictions filed in rural counties each year. While the majority of rural evictions affect families with a white head of household (57 percent in 2010), eviction filing rates are four times higher among rural Black renters than among rural white renters. Eviction filing rates are highest in heavily Black counties in the rural southeast. While eviction filings are somewhat lower in rural majority‐Hispanic counties, these communities experience low‐quality informal housing and overcrowding. Eviction rates are also higher in rural counties with higher rent burdens and where more households include children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural resource development, both extractive (oil, gas, mining, and timber) and non‐extractive (tourism, real estate, outdoor recreation), has been found to negatively impact economic prosperity in rural America. One mechanism recently proposed for why this occurs is high levels of labor market concentration, or oligopsony. Oligopsony occurs when there are few employers within a labor market and can lead to suppressed wages and a power imbalance between employers and workers. In this paper, we test the moderating effect of labor market concentration on the relationship between natural resource development and per capita income and poverty in rural America from 2010 to 2016. By comparing results between extractive and non‐extractive development, as well as manufacturing, we show that labor market concentration attenuates the beneficial relationship observed at low levels of specialization in natural resources—particularly for extractive forms of development. Further, by finding no significant relationship between manufacturing specialization and economic prosperity, nor any moderating effect of labor market concentration in the case of manufacturing, we demonstrate that natural resource development and labor market concentration have a unique relationship with rural American economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stories we tell about ourselves and our communities have the power to impact perceptions of marginalized communities, both positively and negatively. Narratives affect how people view themselves, their town, and other members of their community and thus shape personal interactions, local culture, social situations, and even decisions about allocation of resources. When those stories are rooted in discursive frames—what we can understand as the links between ideology and narrative—they can also perpetuate and reify power inequities. Within rural America, local elites and residents alike use narratives and discursive framing to erase or exclude communities of color and, at times, poor whites in unique ways. This happens through explicit and willful ignorance of narratives of difference that could both complicate normative assumptions and highlight histories of dispossession within rural towns. Drawing on 30 interviews and 12 months of ethnography in the midwestern town of Moses, we provide a case study that demonstrates how narratives perpetuated by both decision makers and residents, across racial and class backgrounds, are rooted in colorblind racism and classblindness regarding African Americans, Mexican Americans, and poor whites. These narratives frame perceptions of residents and neighborhoods, influence town‐level decisions, and erase local histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early in the COVID‐19 pandemic, people living in cities were much more likely than rural residents to become infected with and die from the virus. Beginning in the summer of 2020, however, the proportional increase in virus spread became much greater in rural areas. By March 2021, per capita cases and deaths were greater in nonmetro than in metro areas. Multi‐variate regression analysis found that political views were the most important variable explaining per capita COVID‐19 cases, while measures of disadvantage were the best predictors of COVID‐19 deaths. Counties with high proportions of Trump voters had higher per capita cases, and in nonmetro areas, these counties had higher death rates. Overall, the best predictor of COVID‐19 death rates is low levels of educational attainment, high poverty rates, and high minority populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use panel data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to document the changing volume and rate of intercounty migration among the poor. We evaluate whether the exchange of migrants between metro and nonmetro counties has exacerbated spatial disparities in poverty and whether some nonmetro counties have become "collecting grounds" for America's poor. The PSID highlights exceptionally high rates of intercounty migration among the nonmetro population, but especially among the poor. The results show that rural poor migrants circulate among nonmetro counties, often from one poor county to an even poorer one. This circulation of poor rural migrants has exacerbated the concentration of poverty in the most economically disadvantaged nonmetro counties. Concentrated poverty also is exacerbated by the migration of the "best and brightest" from nonmetro‐to‐metro counties, which also is associated with upward residential attainment (to counties with lower poverty rates). Significantly, metro‐to‐nonmetro migration is both selective of the poor and strongly associated with downward residential mobility to poorer nonmetro counties. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that poor nonmetro counties have become collecting grounds for America's poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 3 progresses the authors' analysis of agrarian myth to American Southern Agrarian writers, representing the Old South or southern states, and their use of agrarian myth in rhetorical space. Singer et al. (2020)'s newly published book, I Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America i explores the power of agrarian myth as an influential rhetoric throughout modern and historical agrarian case studies. The authors argue through an analysis of ACLA publications that the ACLA reinvented agrarian myth by challenging state legitimacy and promoting rural life as the epitome of American democracy and virtue. [Extracted from the article]