Rural Poverty: Why Should States Care and What Can State Policy Do?

Poverty is not evenly distributed across the American landscape. At the county level of aggregation, poverty is overwhelmingly a rural problem, with the most remote rural places at the greatest disadvantage.1 Although research has shown that “place matters” in poverty outcomes and policy impacts, most antipoverty policy in the U.S. is essentially place-blind, not considering how differences among places in economic or social conditions might affect policy outcomes. This paper makes the case that state policy should give renewed attention to locality-based job creation and community capacity building, while maintaining and expanding policy innovations that make work pay, provide work supports and build worker productivity.