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Poll: Rural Illinoisans Predict Gloom, Doom In Their Economic Future

Pete Zarria
/
Flickr (Creative Commons License)

Western Illinois University's Illinois Institute of Rural Affairs has found people living in small communities in the state have a gloomy outlook for their future.

The institute’s Director Christopher Merrett said rural areas are often overlooked in comparison to more urban places like Chicago and his team is investigating ways to bring life back to these small towns.

The most striking statistic from the nearly 1,500 Illinoisans polled is that nearly three quarters of those living in a rural community think their economic opportunities will be worse in five years. Almost half of respondents said their community had gotten worse in the past five years too.

Merrett said one reason for those outcomes is the Great Recession.

“Illinois was sort of slow to come out of that recession and so 2010, 2011, 2012, which would have fallen into our survey timeframe, I think that was part of it,” he said. “Some of the other issues that play into this for tural areas are youth out migration. There was a concern that because there weren’t the kind of jobs that might be available people were leaving.”

He said one of the largest issues facing small towns in Illinois and throughout the Midwest is that young people are leaving them for bigger cities or warmer states, and with their parents’ passing they take their family’s wealth out of those communities.

The institute’s answer to this problem is to form community foundations where the older generation can choose to give up part of their estate to stay within their community.

“People who’ve had a good life and raised a healthy family and made some money and they’ve earned that wealth in that community, they might be willing or convinced to donate half a percent, maybe 1 percent, maybe even 3 percent of their estate to that community foundation,” Merrett said. “The rest of that money leaves, but even if you have two or three percent of that estate that’s worth millions of dollars you could then do a number of things in that rural community.

“You could start a revolving loan fund. You could help the downtown with revitalization. You could run fiber optic cable to the high school.”

The Illinois Rural Life poll did have some positive results though. Merrett said more than 80 percent of respondents were involved in some activity outside of their home or work. He added there was one activity that came up most often.

“Especially in rural areas, you know church is, you think about those anchor institutions, right? And whether it’s in a neighborhood in a big city or in a small town, it would be a school, city hall. It would be the church. I think that’s even more important in rural places.”

Merrett said while people’s outlook for their community was not optimistic with 43 percent saying their community would get worse, the same amount had a better attitude about their family, saying they would be doing better within that same timeframe.

Rural Illinoisans were happy about the size and connectedness of their hometowns, but they still have major concerns about high taxes, economic opportunity and education funding.

Whitney grew up listening to Car Talk to and from her family’s beach vacation each year, but it wasn’t until a friend introduced her to This American Life that radio really grabbed her attention. She is a recent graduate from Union University in Jackson, Tenn., where she studied journalism. When she’s not at WKMS, you can find her working on her backyard compost pile and garden, getting lost on her bicycle or crocheting one massive blanket.
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