From Foresight, Vol. 9, No.1
published 2002
Rural development policies are obviously important to those who live in rural areas. Perhaps less obvious are the benefits of rural development for urban areas. The symbiotic relationship between urban and rural regions is suggested by a February 2000 assertion from the North Carolina Rural Prosperity Task Force: There’s a secret weapon we can use in our war to wage smart growth: rural North Carolina.
Thousands migrate every year from rural to urban counties seeking economic opportunity, thereby contributing to rural decline and urban sprawl. Thus, an important component of any smart growth initiative—which typically has an exclusively urban focus—is a comprehensive rural development strategy. Such a strategy would be aimed at giving more rural residents the opportunities to live and work in their home communities while yielding the added benefit of alleviating urban sprawl somewhat. In short, bridging the urban-rural opportunity gap in Kentucky offers benefits to both urban and rural residents.
Between 1990 and 2000, 28 Kentucky counties experienced net out-migration, that is, the number of people moving out of the county exceeded those who moved in. While these 28 counties are distributed across all across the state, the mountains of eastern Kentucky experienced the highest net out-migration (see map).
Hardin, Pike, and Christian counties led the state with the highest levels of net out-migration at more than 6,000 individuals for each county (see Figure 1), but most of the out-migration from Hardin and Christian counties can be explained by soldiers leaving Fort Knox and Fort Campbell. Five of the remaining seven counties in the top ten are in the mountain region of eastern Kentucky—Harlan, Perry, Floyd, Letcher, and Bell. The other two counties in the top ten, Jefferson and Kenton, are located in the urban triangle.
Figure 1: Ten Kentucky Counties with Highest Rate of Net Out-Migration, 1990-2000
We hasten to note, however, that nearly all of Kentucky’s 120 counties experienced net in-migration from 1990 to 2000. The urban triangle region had seven of the top ten in-migration counties, led by Boone and Fayette (see Figure 2). Counties located outside the urban triangle—Warren, Laurel, and Pulaski—complete the top ten.
Figure 2: Ten Kentucky Counties with Highest Rate of Net In-Migration, 1990-2000
Economic opportunity is clearly a principal cause of intercounty migration. Many measures show Kentucky’s urban areas doing better than rural ones: wages are 20 percent higher, unemployment is lower, and poverty is lower. Indeed, Scorsone, et al. note in “Bridging the Rural-Urban Opportunity Gap,” in this issue of Foresight, that, “rural Kentucky continues to fall behind both urban Kentucky and the United States as a whole with regard to job growth, wages, and overall income.” Coomes and Price elaborate:
The migration of working age persons, particularly young adults, is caused by employment opportunities. Net out-migration of persons ages 18-29 years during 1992-1999 has been significant from the Mountains, Owensboro-Henderson, and Ashland areas. Over a decade, the cumulative impact of migration reduced the expected population of young adults by roughly 25 percent in these three regions. In contrast, more young adults have been attracted to the Northern Kentucky, Lexington, and Louisville areas than have left.(1)
Clearly, there is an association between a county’s economic vitality and its net migration—either in or out. As a point of illustration, we calculated the percentage change in average earnings per job from 1990 to 1999 for all Kentucky counties and then categorized them into one of four groups: low, low-medium, medium-high, and high.(2) Each group includes approximately 30 counties. We then calculated the total migration from 1990 to 2000 for the four groups. The counties with the lowest percentage change in average earnings per job experienced net out-migration of over 7,000 people (see Figure 3). Conversely, the counties with the highest increases in average job earnings experienced the highest net in-migration.
Figure 3: County Economic Vitality and Migration
We also analyzed the most recent Internal Revenue Service data on county-to-county migration to shed additional light on migration patterns. Here, we focus on the two counties with the highest net in-migration during the 1990s—Boone and Fayette—and the two counties (without military installations) with the highest net out-migration—Pike and Harlan.
The data illustrated in Table 1 represent changes in residence from 2000 to 2001. For example, there were 1,956 federal individual income tax returns filed in 2001 (for tax year 2000) by individuals in Boone County who lived in Kenton County in 2000, where their previous tax return was filed (2000 filing year, 1999 tax year). These 1,956 tax returns represent 3,874 exemptions, which is roughly equivalent to the number of people accounted for in these tax returns.(3)
Table 1: Intercounty Migration for Four Kentucky Counties, 2000-2001
Table 1 illustrates at least two major points. First, when people migrate, they tend to stay close to home. The most significant numbers of migrants into Boone and Fayette counties issued from contiguous or nearby counties, rather than distant locales. Likewise, migrants from Pike and Harlan counties clearly prefer to remain close to home, even if it means moving across the state line into West Virginia (e.g., Mingo County) or Tennessee (e.g., Claiborne, Knox, or Hamblen counties).
Second, migrants from Pike or Harlan counties opting to leave the eastern Kentucky mountain region tend to migrate to a county in the urban triangle, usually Fayette or Madison County. One can see, for example, that Fayette County was the top destination for migrants from Pike County in 2000-2001, while Madison County was the top destination for Harlan County migrants.
These two patterns hold up when we extend the analysis to the decade of the 1990s and examine the out-migration patterns from the six eastern Kentucky counties with the highest net out-migration: Bell, Floyd, Harlan, Letcher, Perry, and Pike. From 1990 to 2000, the IRS data reveal the movement of over 30,400 federal individual income tax returns from these six counties, which represents approximately 60,000 people.(4) Where did these people go? Figure 4 shows that about half (49 percent) left the state while the other half remained in Kentucky. Of those who remained in Kentucky, 17 percent of the returns showed up the next year in another county in the mountain area while 11 percent moved to the Lexington area.
Adequate economic opportunities in rural Kentucky will not completely solve growth problems in urban Kentucky. Nonetheless, viable rural development policies can play an important role in statewide “smart growth” efforts, slowing, and perhaps reversing, rural decline. A significant number of Kentuckians migrated in the last decade from rural areas to the urban triangle in pursuit of economic opportunity; IRS data confirm that many remained in or near their rural communities. Also, these intercounty migration patterns suggest that regional approaches to development are clearly warranted. Growth and development problems in Lexington, for example, cannot be solved without simultaneously addressing development issues in surrounding and eastern Kentucky counties. As we noted in a 1995 Center report, “The poverty or prosperity of any part of Kentucky—rural or urban—influences the state’s overall well-being. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of a strategy for greater economic and social well-being that does not recognize and systematically address the development of rural Kentucky.”(5)
* Mr. Childress is the Executive Director of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center. Return to text.
1. Paul Coomes and Michael Price, The Recent Economic Performance of Regions in Kentucky (University of Louisville, May 2001): 37. Return to text.
2. Counties in which the change in average earnings per job from 1990 to 1999 ranged between –3.8% and 30% are included in the “low” category. If the change was between 30.2% and 38.5%, they are included in the “low-medium” group. Counties with growth rates between 39.5% and 46.1% are “medium-high,” and the “high” category is reserved for counties with rates of 47% and greater. Return to text.
3. The number of exemptions is “roughly equivalent to the number of people” because there are circumstances in which one cannot claim oneself as an exemption on one’s own tax return (e.g., if a parent, or someone else, is already claiming one as a dependent). Return to text.
4. We should note that it is possible, indeed likely, that some people are being counted more than once in this decade-long analysis. For example, it is possible someone moved from Pike to Fayette County in 1991, and then from Fayette back to Pike in 1993. If they moved from Pike County again, they are counted again. Return to text.
5. Michal Smith-Mello, Reclaiming Community, Reckoning with Change (Frankfort: Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center, 1995): xiii. Return to text.
