Wisconsin's Rural Population Trending Upward
A quarter of Wisconsin’s nearly six million people live in rural parts of the state, and a new report says that number may be growing.
The Rural Policy Institute is out with a new report that looks at the trends for Wisconsin’s rural communities and counties.
“It’s essential they recognize that Wisconsin is a largely rural state, and policymakers on both sides of the aisle must understand the significant presence of rural areas in their districts,” RPI Executive Director Bob Welch said.
The RPI’s new report, called The Rural/Urban Balance in Wisconsin tracks the population shift in the state going back to 1980.
“The population of rural counties grew, but it grew more slowly than the metro population,” the report notes. “In the 40-year period between the 1980 census and the 2020 census the percentage of Wisconsin's population that lives in rural counties fell from 32% to 30%.”
The RPI says just under 2 million people live in Wisconsin’s rural counties. There are a little over 4 million who live in the state’s metro counties.
But just one Wisconsin county, Milwaukee County, doesn’t have any rural areas the report noted. At least a part of Wisconsin’s 71 other counties has at least one rural area.
“Rural municipalities hold 25% of the state's population. Moderately-dense rural municipalities, referred to as rural adjacent, contain an additional 16%. Suburban municipalities contain 19% of Wisconsin's population, while the remaining 40% live in urban areas,” the report’s authors wrote. “If one were to combine the population of low and moderately dense rural municipalities it would be roughly equal to the urban population (but less than the urban population combined with suburban.)”
Welch said lawmakers in Madison should take note of that population balance as they head into a new term in January.
In fact, the RPI report notes that rural representation in the state legislature increased under Gov. Tony Evers’ new legislative maps.
Perhaps the biggest revelation in the new report is that Wisconsin’s rural population is no longer shrinking.
“The covid-19 pandemic may have slowed or even reversed the 40-year trend towards increased urbanization. Between 2020 and 2023 the population of rural Wisconsin counties actually grew faster than the Metro County population. The data supports anecdotal accounts of people exiting the cities for the country during the pandemic, the report added.
You can read the report’s executive summary here. A full report is due out by the end of the year.
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