Rural Areas

Malvern and Exton may be hot properties now, but the county's future lies in its rural north, west and south, officials of the Chester County Development Council said. Towns such as Phoenixville to the north, Sadsbury to the west and Avondale to the south are becoming more attractive as land in the eastern and central parts of the county grows more congested - and more expensive. This glimpse at the future came courtesy of three officials of the council: Gary Smith, executive director; Walter "Skip" Feimster, assistant director, and Bob McDevitt, development specialist.

WASHINGTON - Rural America now accounts for just 16 percent of the nation's population, the lowest ever. The latest 2010 Census numbers hint at an emerging America where, by midcentury, city boundaries become indistinct and rural areas grow ever less relevant. Many communities could shrink to virtual ghost towns as they shutter businesses and close down schools, demographers say. More metro areas are booming into sprawling megalopolises. Barring fresh investment that could bring jobs, however, large swaths of the Great Plains and Appalachia, along with parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, and north Texas, could face significant population declines.

The 1978 Ford ambulance has rolled up 70,000 miles on the two-lane roads of Koochiching County, and the volunteer drivers worry about breakdowns on late- night runs. But since the Littlefork Hospital closed in 1986, the battered ambulance is the vital link to emergency care for residents of this little northern Minnesota community. "Sure we'd like a new ambulance, but how do you spread the $55,000 cost over less than 1,000 people?" says Dale Peterson, Littlefork city clerk.

Rural Americans face a shortage of doctors and health facilities and are more likely than their urban counterparts to lack medical insurance, according to a new survey. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported yesterday that 12.6 percent of rural residents rate their health as fair or poor - a description used by only 9.3 percent of urban residents. The rural poor - those with family income under $20,000 - rated their health the lowest: 18.8 percent of those rural residents said their health was only fair.

Though metropolitan regions across Pennsylvania enjoy a variety of broadband, or high-speed Internet, services, there's a lack of broadband competition in rural areas. This means that many residents and businesses in rural areas of the state may now have access only to inferior broadband service. Unless significant upgrades are made in many of the state's rural telecommunications infrastructures, this will remain the case in the future. Rural areas need advanced telecommunications infrastructures to attract new businesses and industries, and adequate broadband services are essential for spurring entrepreneurial activity, creating jobs, and supporting telecommuting workers who live in rural areas.

Pennsylvania's rural communities are often overshadowed by the dramatic social problems of Philadelphia. The 3.6 million people who live in those communities give us the largest rural population of any state in the nation. It is tempting for outsiders to assume that these smaller communities have pleasantly avoided the widespread social and economic problems of recent decades. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rural youth, for example, face tough choices and, too often, clouded futures.

The dominant faces of hunger in America are young, white and female, and they are turning up more in rural areas, according to a study released yesterday by Second Harvest, the nation's largest hunger-relief agency. At a time of national economic prosperity, nearly 26 million people sought meals and groceries last year at food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters. An additional 70,000 were turned away because of a shortage of more than 115 million pounds of food. The most comprehensive study of hunger in four years shows the problem is increasingly defined along gender and generational lines.

What do a Chester County horse farm, a Main Line estate and a Center City townhouse have in common? All three were up for sale through real estate agents. After several months, all three failed to sell. And the owners of all three recently decided to sell their properties at auction. Real estate auctioneers say their method of selling, long a mainstay in more rural areas of the country, is gaining acceptance in the urban Northeast and becoming increasingly common now that the home-buying market is slow.

It's not all that hard to explain how I ended up as a luncheon speaker at the Pennsylvania Farmers Association Convention last week in Hershey, but it's not a short story, either. First of all, it had nothing to do with my knowledge of agriculture. As someone who can kill houseplants by simply being in the vicinity of them for a sustained period of time, I make no claims in that regard. No, I was there to talk about, of all things, urban problems, a subject that was, at best, only thinly disguised by my announced topic: "The Two Pennsylvanias.

Rural America is becoming less like farmland and more like Main Street. The Census Bureau has reported that only 7 percent of rural households are on farms, while 48 percent are in the nation's metropolitan areas. A rural household is a person, friends or a family living together in a community of less than 2,500 people - whether it's a tight village or a broad spread of countryside. The report on the national situation speaks of the sort of situation that exists in the rural corners of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, such as West Fallowfield Township in western Chester County, Durham Township in northern Bucks County and Tabernacle in southern Burlington County.

Two days after agreeing to pay the U.S. government $42.8 million to settle allegations that it overbilled Medicare for the treatment of patients who needed intense inpatient rehabilitation, Tenet Healthcare Corp, the Dallas-based owner of Hahnemann University Hospital and St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, both in Philadelphia, said it expected to receive $84 million as part of an industrywide Medicare settlement. The settlement in favor of Tenet and other hospital operators came out of a 13-year-old lawsuit over Medicare's calculation of a wage index for urban hospitals relative to those in rural areas.

Houses trembled a half mile away when a natural gas explosion rattled a compressor station near Springville, a hotbed of Marcellus Shale development in northern Pennsylvania. Just two hours after the March 29 blast, a gas safety inspector from the state Public Utility Commission was on the scene to begin an investigation into possible violations of gas safety rules. But he did not get far. The PUC shut down its examination last week after determining the station was in a rural area - and thus outside its regulatory reach.

THE U.S. SOLDIER accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians last weekend had twice been injured during tours in Iraq and was reluctant to leave on his fourth deployment, a Seattle lawyer said yesterday. "He wasn't thrilled about going on another deployment," said the lawyer, John Henry Browne. "He was told he wasn't going back, and then he was told he was going. " Browne, a well-known Seattle defense attorney who once represented serial killer Ted Bundy, said he has been asked to represent the soldier, a 38-year-old staff sergeant from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma.

KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan suffered a double blow Thursday: The Taliban broke off talks with the United States, and President Hamid Karzai said NATO should pull out of rural areas and speed up the transfer of security responsibilities to Afghan forces nationwide after the killing of 16 civilians. The moves represent new setbacks to America's strategy for ending the 10-year-old war at a time when support for the conflict is plummeting. Part of the U.S. exit strategy is to transfer authority gradually to Afghan forces.

Evolving problems with pipelines Hats off to The Inquirer for investigating pipelines in Pennsylvania ("Loophole limiting pipe inspections," Sunday)! Problems with unregulated and unmapped pipelines in rural areas of our commonwealth are complex and evolving. Rural areas will become residential and suburban. What will happen when you want to dig a foundation, drill a well for water, or build a road, and you hit something unknown? Remote areas are great recreational sites.

Pennsylvania regulators are taking steps to begin safety checks of some natural gas pipelines in the Marcellus Shale regions - hiring inspectors and drafting new rules that will bring the state in line with the rest of the nation. But a dispute continues over whether the state oversight goes far enough. The new safety-inspection and construction regulations still will not apply in the most rural areas of shale country, the hotbed for new pipeline projects, with up to 25,000 miles being built or on the drawing boards.

WASHINGTON - Federal regulators have unveiled a plan for overhauling the $8 billion fund that subsidizes phone service in rural areas and for the poor. It redirects the money toward broadband expansion. The Federal Communications Commission's plan, adopted Thursday, establishes a new "Connect America Fund" for mobile telephone and broadband in rural communities and needy areas. The money will continue to come from a surcharge on consumers' and businesses' monthly phone bills.

Widespread flooding from Hurricane Irene should have been enough to hold New Jersey to plans to restrict development in rural areas. But apparently it wasn't. A draft rule proposed by the state Board of Public Utilities would make ratepayers involuntary investors in sprawl, a cause of increased flooding and a burden on taxpayers who have to finance infrastructure. The BPU is proposing that all ratepayers subsidize the extension of gas and electric as well as regulated water and sewer lines even in rural areas, where the state has previously discouraged development.

By Anirudh Krishna President Obama is racing around the country urging Americans to support his jobs bill. Yet even if Republicans agreed to everything he wants and the economy quickly bounced back, millions of Americans would still face a grim future. The Census Bureau reported last week that more Americans are living in poverty than at any time in the past 50 years. Median household incomes have fallen to where they were 14 years ago, prompting talk of a "lost decade. " I've spent most of this decade studying poverty up close, talking with poor families in the United States and around the world.

If you want to get from here to there, don't expect smooth driving in Pennsylvania's rural areas. The commonwealth was tied for 12th place in the proportion of major rural roads - 17 percent - in poor condition in 2008. That ranking comes from a new report detailing the sorry state of the nation's rural transportation infrastructure amid its growing importance. While the country roads here are bad, they can't compare to the bridges, according to "Rural Connections: Challenges and Opportunities in America's Heartland" by TRIP, a transportation research group supported by construction-related and insurance interests.