2 .
million people from July 1992 to July 1994. The non-metro population of the US .
had an average annual growth rate of 0.9 percent between 1990 and 1994. This is .
still not as fast as the 1.1 percent growth rate in the metro population, but .
the gap has narrowed considerably.
Population in non-metro areas has already grown more than three times as fast in .
the 1990s as it did in the 1980s. The current growth spurt is rooted in long-term economic changes that favor non-metro areas, along with the strong conviction of many Americans that small-town life is better than big-city life. Non-metro counties also grew rapidly in the 1970s for many of the same reasons that fuel their growth in the 1990s. It now appears that the rural hard times of the 1980s were only a brief reversal of a fundamental population shift. The rural rebound of the 1990s is fueled not by births, but by more rural .
residents staying put and some metropolitan residents moving to small towns and .
rural homes. Specifically, 56 percent of non-metro growth between 1990 and 1994 .
came from net gains in migration. This represents another change in .
long-standing trends. .
For most of this century, the "natural increase" of births minus deaths has .
driven modest growth in America's non-metro population. At the same time, .
metropolitan areas have been growing rapidly through natural increase, the net .
in-migration of former rural residents, and international immigration. Between .
1920 and 1970, the non-metro population grew by only 8.8 million, while metros .
gained more than 88 million residents.
In the 1970s, the direction of migration shifted toward non-metro areas. Non-metro natural increase also continued, and the result was that non-metro counties grew .
faster than metro counties. Then the traditional pattern seemed to return. .
Non-metropolitan areas lost nearly 1.4 million residents to out-migration in the .
1980s. They gained 2.7 million through natural increase during this decade, but .
