Increasing Older Populations and Rural Community Vitality: The Role of Housing

Many rural communities are experiencing an increasing proportion of older residents. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between theproportion of older and younger residents to county and rural community vitality; and toproject implications for housing policy. Dataffom the non-metropolitan counties in the 12 North Central states were analyzed using the USA Counties 1996 CD-ROM. The findings indicate that counties with larger proportions of older residents do well on some measures of community vitality (i.e., higher per capita income; higher percent of people above poverty level) and poorly on other measures (i.e., have fewer human capital resources). Rural communities would appear to benefit from having a combination of residents in different age groups. To accommodate both older persons and younger families, rural communities will need to find creative solutions to provide appropriate affoordaable housing stock.