Brad Gabel, a native of California, came up with the perfect catchphrase for his bakery.
“Bringing big city tastes to a small town, Iowa,” Gable said.
Gabel now lives in Orange City, a community of about 6,000 people in the northwest corner of the state and runs Brad’s Bakery Bistro.
“I was able to adapt easily to Orange City, even though I was born and raised in Los Angeles, because I got involved in the community, whether it was with the church, community organizations or local businesses,” he said.
A recent study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Rural America at a Glance shows the population in rural areas is rising after a decade of decline. The average growth across the country was a quarter of a percent for rural counties – defined as those with cities of up to 50,000 people – from 2020 to 2022.
Trisha Purdon, director of the Office of Rural Prosperity at the Kansas Department of Commerce, said state incentives such as the Rural Opportunity Zone and Make My Move program are helping pair families in urban areas with communities and jobs in more rural parts of the state. She added there are all sizes of businesses opening in small towns.
“Cherryvale, for example, just secured a $400 million new soybean crushing plant that will need to hire 50 new people. They are now working to build new housing to support the new families looking to move to the area for new job opportunities,” Purdon said in an email.
However, not all areas experienced the same increase.
John Cromartie, a geographer in the USDA’s Resource and Rural Economy Division and one of the study’s authors, said the trend is more visible in the South, the Northeast and West and less in the Corn Belt or Great Plains.
“Because the population is, on average, much older, you don’t have as many younger people having kids, and it’s harder to attract those kinds of families,” Cromartie said. “They have higher rates of natural decrease compared to other states due to an older population.”
Cromartie’s research shows only part of the rural Midwest saw gains, mainly fueled by people leaving major cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Others retired and moved to resort areas, including the Upper Great Lakes and Ozarks.
Jeff Pinkerton, the director of economic research for the Missouri Department of Economic Development, said some counties around the Lake of the Ozarks saw sharp increases between the time period of 2020 to 2022. He added the state is seeing more of a balance between urban and rural growth, with some decline in the state’s largest counties, which include the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas.
“This is just two years’ worth of data, so it’s difficult to call it a trend, but it’s very interesting and worth watching in the future,” Pinkerton said in an email.
Bigger towns in better position to grow
Brad Gabel’s adoptive home of Orange City experienced exceptional growth, several times the study’s average, and officials with the local Chamber of Commerce credit entrepreneurship.
