Gallup Polls conducted between 1966 and 1972 indicated that the percentage of persons stating they would prefer living in a city has steadily declined, reaching the all-time low of 13 percent in 1972. Interviews conducted with a sample of 1,806 Americans showed that while one-third of the respondents currently live in towns, villages, or rural…

Current U.S. settlement patterns have begun to exhibit a significant shift away from very large metropolitan centers toward more thinly settled peripheral areas. This new trend has been the subject of many recent studies which have considered data on the county level but have been unable to detect population movement within counties and among…

The paper briefly focuses on two questions: Can the recent growth trend be expected to continue into the future? and What does this imply as far as public policy and programs are concerned? Statistics on growth in the seventies suggest three possibilities: a change in the functions of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas; the decline of the city…

Case study describes a depressed rural New York community that became a migration destination for urban poor people, causing dramatic increases in poverty rate, welfare rolls, and service needs. In-migrants were attracted by low-income housing and, because of their limited job skills, were not deterred by lack of jobs. Discusses community impacts…

Aging of the national population coupled with shifts in long-term redistribution trends have sparked interest in the spatial distribution of the elderly population. The insufficiency of economic models for explanations of elderly migration has been recognized and new approaches are being developed. Findings regarding the effects of retirement,…

An unexpected demographic development in the United States in the 1970's was the shift of nonmetropolitan areas to net inmigration, reversing a 70-year trend. Using the 1970 definition of metropolitan, the percent of the population living in metropolitan areas fell from 69% in 1970 to 67.8% in 1978. No easily identifiable set of reasons explained…

Using multiple regression analysis for each county and a case study of selected services in Johnson County, Iowa, the study estimated the impacts of rural non-farm development in Iowa on the demand for local public services, on the cost of providing these services, and on the distribution of service benefits and tax burdens among population…