Imagine, for a moment, a world in which a former U.S. president is nearly assassinated, a Republican vice presidential nominee is announced, and the current U.S. president and presumptive Democratic nominee drops out of an election occurring not even four months from now, all in the span of roughly one week. 

Oh, yeah! We don’t have to imagine, our reality really is this absurd. 

I am still reeling from the past week, but of course, the news cycle races on so my journalist brain is already onto the next question – what does all this mean for rural America? 

Mahbub Rashid is the Dean of the Architecture school at the University of Kansas. His recent book, Built Environment and Population Health in Small-Town America: Learning from Small Cities of Kansas, tests whether the most basic principles of urban planning really apply to small towns and rural areas. Shocker: many of them don’t.

Enjoy our conversation about what we miss when we bring an urban sensibility to rural problems.

Rural America’s recovery from the job losses of the pandemic has been a lot like the recovery from the Great Recession — slow and difficult.

Annual employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that in 2023, nonmetropolitan counties still had not quite recovered all the jobs they lost during the pandemic. Nonmetro counties were down 101,800 jobs compared to their pre-pandemic numbers, representing a 0.5% decline in employment. 

Municipal governments across the United States are looking to rein in spending as pandemic-era stimulus dries up and inflation lingers for longer than expected.

“Clearly there are significant capital needs across the U.S.,” said Michael Rinaldi, senior director at Fitch Ratings’ public finance group. The group issued a AA investment grade general obligation bond rating for New York City in March 2024.

A Georgia mayor was brutally heckled at a press conference Wednesday over his perceived “sanctuary city” policies following the murder of nursing student Laken Riley, allegedly at the hands of a Venezuelan migrant.

“You’re a liar!” one man shouted at Athens Mayor Kelly Girtz, according to a report by Fox News Digital. “You’re the one who is guilty and got blood on your hands for this murder, sir!”

Wildlife officials plan to release gray wolves in Colorado in coming weeks, at the behest of urban voters and to the dismay of rural residents who don’t want the predators but have waning influence in the Democratic-led state.

The notion of a hyper-religious rural America, one that stands in direct contrast to a modern and secularizing urban America, is pervasive. But the numbers just don’t support that stereotype. 

Factors like income, race, partisanship, age, and education influence religious attendance more than geography does.

Out of all the people who moved from larger cities to rural areas in 2021, two-thirds wound up living in the rural South, a Daily Yonder analysis of IRS data shows. 

Southern rural counties attracted 65% of the people who moved from metropolitan to nonmetropolitan counties in 2021. The region that attracted the next largest share was the Midwest, which had 25% of the nation’s rural in-migrants. 

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

The Tucker, Barbour, and Randolph County pocket of central West Virginia is a beautiful part of the state. Embraced by the million-acre Monongahela National Forest, the region has become a prized location for well-appointed second homes and retirement tranquility. There’s lots to do: ski resorts, both downhill and cross country; vast miles of hiking and biking trails; campgrounds galore – an outdoor recreation mecca.