Rural Growth Lags Behind Cities in ‘80s

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 Wednesday.

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,” said the new report, “Patterns of Metropolitan Area and Country Population Growth.”

That 1970s pattern has been widely discussed as a rural renaissance, with Americans moving to the countryside in search of a new life style.

“What this (new report) suggests is not a total halt, but it has definitely slowed down,” said Donald Starsinic, a Census Bureau statistician.

“The 1970s was a special period, and we really didn’t know how long it would continue. But its reversal of old patterns has not continued,” he said in a telephone interview.

“That does not mean we are going back to a pattern when metro area growth totally dominates the country. They are growing faster, which returns us to a pattern more like earlier decades,” Starsinic continued. “But the difference is not as pronounced; there is still a reasonable amount of non-metropolitan growth.

‘Too Soon to Tell’

“We can’t be sure if this is a real trend or just a temporary aberration caused by the recession, the decline in (rural) job opportunities and the energy crunch,” the census official said. “It’s too soon to tell.”

While the relationship between city and rural growth has been reversed on a national basis in this decade, the change does not constitute a return to the general growth patterns that existed before 1970, the report stressed.

The biggest change in recent decades is the increasing strength of the South and West--the Sun Belt--in comparison to the Northeast and Midwest. And that has continued into this decade.

“In the 1960s, the North grew at about three-quarters the rate of the nation as a whole. Since 1970, its growth rate has only been one-fifth that of the nation, and the South and West together have grown nine times as fast as the North,” the report said.

The change in the metropolitan growth patterns was best reflected in the South, the nation’s most populous region and the only area where metropolitan growth topped rural growth rates both in the 1970s and 1980s.

Metropolitan growth in the South averaged 1.8% between 1980 and 1984, compared with a 1% rate in non-metropolitan areas. In the 1970s, urban growth in the South topped rural increases by 2% to 1.5%.

Urban and rural growth rates since 1980 are nearly identical in two regions, averaging 1.9% in the West and 0.1% in the Midwest.

In the 1970s, by comparison, rural areas grew by 2.6% and metro areas grew by 2.0% annually in the West. In the Midwest, non-metropolitan growth topped that of the cities by 0.7% to 0.3%.

Only the Northeast continues the pattern of faster rural than urban growth, although the difference has eased, the report showed.

Since 1980, Northeastern urban areas have grown at 0.3% annually, slightly less than the 0.4% non-metropolitan increases. But in the 1970s, Northeastern rural areas grew 0.9% per year, while the cities posted a loss of 0.1% annually.

The nation’s five largest urban areas grew by 6.6 million people in the 1960s, but they added only 1.56 million in the 1970s--with New York and Philadelphia actually losing people.

The largest population increases since 1980 were in metropolitan Los Angeles, 875,000; Houston, 466,000; Dallas-Fort Worth, 417,000; San Francisco, 317,000; and Atlanta, 242,000.