While a rose by any other name will still smell sweet, a community once called rural,  as Daily Yonder points out,  paints a bleak picture of what we’re calling rural areas…

Later this year, some of the nation’s most economically successful “rural” counties will be reclassified as metropolitan, moving their populations and economic output from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan with the stroke of a pen.

That’s because 2023 is the year the federal Office of Management and Budget will create a major revision for its list of Metropolitan Statistical Areas based on data from the 2020 Census.

Because of how Metropolitan Statistical Areas are defined – using a combination of population figures and commuting patterns – the reclassification is likely to move some of the fastest growing and economically productive rural counties into the metropolitan category.

This gives a falsely bleak impression of rural America, according to scholars Daniel T. Lichter and Kenneth M. Johnson. The researchers from Cornell and the University of New Hampshire respectively, call this phenomenon “the paradox of rural population decline.”