I think this forum really overestimates how "poor" rural areas are, quality-of-life speaking. There are a lot of people in Iowa City - a vibrant college town - that "make more" than most in the poorer town of Keokuk in SE Iowa ... but a lot of those "poorer" people in Keokuk enjoy dirt cheap drinks at their favorite bars, boating on the Mississippi River with their friends and a decent sized house for comparatively cheap. Your taste and preference is that living in Keokuk would be boring as hell and absolutely terrible? So what? LOL, joke's on you!
I guess Keokuk would be OK if you can sustain a life there, but given the steady population loss over many decades, I guess fewer and fewer people can. Besides the population loss, the county Keokuk is in (Lee) is substantially older than the nation as a whole (20% 65+ vs 16%), which doesn't bode well for future growth either. You can enjoy your cheap house in Keokuk but there may not be anyone to sell it to when your done (unless some hi-falutin Iowa City kid wants a weekend home)
And things could get worse as America's worst case scenario, West Virginia, can always show.
http://www.wvva.com/story/38153485/2018/05/Wednesday/appalachian-power-seeks-rate-increase-due-to-decline-electricity-usagehttp://wvpublic.org/post/west-virginia-american-water-requests-rate-increase#stream/0Both the water and electric companies cite population decline as the need to increase rates. It's hard to maintain the same infrastructure over the same geographic area with fewer people to pay for it, although Iowa is relatively flat while WV isn't, so I'm sure it's even harder in WV.
But then, maybe Iowa and WV aren't that different as the town of Buxton, IA may show:
http://www.iptv.org/iowapathways/mypath/great-buxtonA coal mining town in Southern Iowa that had 5000 people or more, half black, half Swede and Welsh. Even sent a black man to the state lege. and then poof completely disappeared. Some say the coal ran out, some say a strange visitor from the future, a Amabo Kcarab came to town and destroyed it. Whatever happened it's nothing but farmland today.
My parents both came from small towns in Iowa, NE of Waterloo. Too far away from the interstate or "metros" to be of any interest to people nowadays. My Grandparents had a farmhouse but moved into town in the 50s. The town had a small main street with businesses on both sides for about a block. Maybe 10-12 that I could remember from the 70s including my grandfather's Produce and mill. They rented the farm house or let people live there in exchange for maintenance over the years. Super cheap. In the 90s grandma sold the farm (only 80 acres) after Grandpa died and after I, the only adult male grandchild in the family declined an offer to go "Green Acres". The new owner tore the farmhouse and barn down because that was another half-acre that could be farmed. The house that they lived in in town still stands and has actually been built out a bit by a couple that moved back to Iowa after being in California for decades, but I'd estimate that a quarter of the houses in town have been torn down over the years. There are only two buildings left on main street, the volunteer firehouse and the Tap. Everything else torn or burned down including my grandfather's building.
I go back to Iowa every 3-5 years, still have kin doing well up there, but except for one family that own a 600 acre farm everyone else has gravitated towards Dubuque or around Cedar Rapids-Iowa City (Solon and Mt. Vernon specifically). I guess my point is rural people have been moving for quite some time now and will continue too, and it did reduce poverty because there is nothing there. I do think that in conjunction with the baby boomers approaching the end, it leaves the WVs and Keokuks of the world in an even more precarious situation than they've been in for decades now. If your community wasn't "dynamic" enough to attract immigrants over the last few decades, your population pyramid is old and looks like a cliff in some places (I'm looking at you WV)
