How has rural America changed over the past several decades?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The most important would be the continued decline in the number of people working on the land. Then there's the deindustrialisation of most of the various rural-industrial districts (mines or textiles, makes no difference). Then there's the further encroach of urban life in rural areas closer - or, to be more accurate in many cases, more accessible to - the larger metropolitan regions (this is more immediately obvious in the U.S.A. than other industrialised countries because of criminally lax planning regulations). Then there's the tendency for services to centralise around larger and larger towns (and so to decline precipitously in smaller ones). And, of course, the tendency for an increasing share of agricultural labour to be performed by migrants of one type or another. That kind of thing. At that essentially abstract level it's the same in every industrialised country.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Has anything NOT changed over the past several decades?

More things stay the same than change, actually. And the most important change often happens at a pace that's difficult to clearly observe.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A friend of mine from Michigan told me recently that so many formerly prosperous towns and districts throughout the state have been absolutely hollowed out by de-industrialization and population decline. At the same time, there has been an explosion in the growth of sprawling subdivisions all over-and not just in the metropolitan areas, but in areas further and further out in the countryside (or what was once the countryside, anyway).

Yes, this is an international trend.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

I dislike it intensely (shocking, I know). Of course it isn't just bad for the countryside (however defined), it's also bad for the city.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Yes; you see this everywhere as well. Any service - including churches, voluntary organisations and so on - has a minimum number of participants (or consumers, or customers, or members, or whatever: depends on the type of organisation) that it can't survive falling below. In the area I grew up in there are now too many pubs for the number of potential/actual customers, so they are never all operating at the same time (exactly which are closed tends to change, of course).