Equal Opportunity In Rural Housing

Housing is crucial to the quality of life and wellbeing for individuals and familes, but the availability of adequate or affordable housing also plays a vital role in community economic development. Rural areas face a substantial disadvantage compared to urban areas in regard to housing, and this book explores these issues. Rural Housing and Economic Development includes chapters from nationally known experts from throughout the U.S. to provide insight to help understand and address the difficult housing concerns within rural areas. The chapters cover a variety of issues including housing for rural minorities, the extent of and problems associated with mobile home dwelling, the extent to which affordable rental housing is available in rural areas, the rapidly growing elderly population, and the housing consequences of rapid population and economic growth associated with energy development. The authors not only describe various housing problems, but also suggest policy approaches to more effectively address them. This book will be a vital resource to policy makers at the local, state or national level as they grapple with difficult rural housing problems. Researchers and professionals dealing with housing issues will also benefit from the insights of these experts while the book will also be appropriate for upper level undergraduates or graduate students in courses on housing or economic development.

In the post-World War II era, widespread rural poverty, most notably among farmers, dominated rural policy concerns. The Eisenhower Administration's Undersecretary for Agriculture, True D. Morse, began a rural development program in 1955 to assist low-income farmers. Because agriculture was the major economic activity in many rural areas of the time, a focus on farms and farm households became de facto rural policy. The war on poverty during the 1960s continued the focus on rural poverty as a central policy issue. When agriculture began to decline as rural America's dominant economic activity, policy attention shifted to rural revitalisation. The 1980s farm financial crisis and economic dislocation in rural America brought the importance of rural structural change to the forefront of policy concerns. The further decline of farming to less than 8% of rural employment and the loss of many manufacturing jobs during the past decade have highlighted the growing gap between many rural areas and the Nation's urban/suburban areas. While no overarching framework guides rural policy at the federal level, adequate housing, employment creation and business retention, human capital concerns, poverty issues, medical care, and infrastructure development remain key foci of federal rural policy.