While most of US gets a raise, rural areas stand pat

In another sign that the economic recovery is moving very slowly for rural America, median household incomes for rural Americans didn’t improve from 2014 to 2015 while they did for metropolitan areas.  The Census Bureau’s newly released income and earnings report for 2014-2015 showed that median household incomes rose last year for the nation for the first time since 2007. Nationally, median household income grew by about $2,800 to reach $56,516 in 2015. That’s an increase of a little more than 5 percent. But the national increase hides geographic differences. People living in the principal cities of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) saw their median income rise by an estimated 7.3 percent. People in the suburbs (inside an MSA but not living in the principal city) had a median-income increase of 4 percent. But median household income for rural Americans (those living outside a metropolitan statistical area) dropped by an estimated 2 percent from 2014 to 2015. The drop was within the survey’s margin of error, meaning the drop could be a little more or a little less than the estimate. But either way, rural America’s income picture is different from the rest of the nation’s. “I think the most interesting thing is that the rural numbers were some of the only estimates [in the report] that did not show a statistically significant, gain,” wrote Keith Wiley, a researcher at the rural-focused Housing Assistance Council. In other words, the rest of the nation did measurably better while rural America saw virtually no change. The Census report had similar news for rural America in its poverty estimates. Metropolitan areas did better; rural areas did the same or perhaps a little worse.