Community Change and Social Mobility in Poor Places: A New Research Agenda for Rural America.

This paper reviews the literature on poverty and community with the purpose of identifying community factors that facilitate mobility, and introduces new survey research to begin to answer questions related to the interplay of social stratification, community change, and community-level resources in rural America. Focusing on recent scholarship in the social sciences and community development field, we summarize what is known about how community factors in depressed places perpetuate poverty and the circumstances under which community economic development includes upward mobility for long term residents. While much is known about how community characteristics contribute to persistent poverty, there is little research examining the circumstances under which poor residents are upwardly mobile while remaining in their communities, or those under which community revitalization includes opportunities for long-term lower income residents to experience upward mobility. We hypothesize that community change that reduces poverty as local residents experience economic improvements occurs in places where there is an economically independent middle class. We draw on survey data from seven distinct rural regions selected to reflect a mixture of three key dynamics reshaping rural America: amenity-driven growth, traditional industrial decline, and persistent poverty. These places differ substantially in terms of civic culture and the ways that residents perceive and experience their communities. We argue that current conditions in changing rural communities provide a unique set of opportunities to investigate the community-level social, political, and institutional factors that may facilitate place-based upward mobility for low income residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]