Urban Areas Grow Faster Than Rural, Reversing a Trend
The nation’s urban areas are growing faster than the countryside in this decade, reversing the “rural renaissance” trend of population growth in the 1970s, the Census Bureau reported today.
The metropolitan population grew by 4.5% to 180 million people between 1980 and 1984, while the number of non-metropolitan residents increased by 3.4% to 56.4 million, an agency study found.
While metropolitan areas continued to grow at the 1% annual rate that prevailed in the 1970s, the non-metropolitan growth rate fell from 1.3% annually in the last decade to about 0.8% a year since 1980.
“This apparently restores a pattern of predominantly metropolitan population growth which had extended for more than a century until the dramatic turnaround of the 1970s,” the report said.
That 1970s pattern has been widely discussed as a rural renaissance, with Americans moving to the countryside in search of a new life style.
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