Skip to main content
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty

Financial Security in Rural Areas

Building wealth in rural America, By Ray Lopez, April 19, 2011, Daily Yonder: “Residents of rural communities face different challenges than their urban counterparts when they try to build assets or take steps to achieve financial security. The reasons are many and familiar. Rural communities have seen their share of economic struggles in recent years. Nearly one in six people living in rural America fell below the poverty line in 2009, according to U.S. Census data. Of the nearly 3 million Texas residents who were classified as rural by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, 19.5 percent were below the poverty line. That is 3 percentage points higher than in urban Texas. Unemployment and educational attainment levels were also worse in rural Texas than in urban Texas…”