When you talk about the state of rural America, the story usually involves boarded-up storefronts and shrinking downtowns. Declines in jobs and population in small towns in Illinois and across America stretch back decades.
But speakers at an upcoming economic development conference say the game may have changed.
“We now have opportunities for people who live in places where they’d like to live and couldn’t in the past because they had to go to work every day,” said Norm Walzer who founded the Illinois Rural Affairs Institute at Western Illinois University in 1989.
“It’s debatable as to what’s going to happen in the next few years—whether companies will call people back to work in the office—but without question I think there’s going to be a segment of the population who will continue to work not in the office every day. They’re going to work from home, wherever,” Walzer said.
“That opens the opportunity for them to live elsewhere,” he said. In addition, Walzer said advances in telecommunications also allow telemedicine to serve rural citizens who may not live close to a medical facility.
Amanda Weinstein, an economics professor at the University of Akron, who’s also one of the speakers at the Feb. 22-23rd conference in Springfield, said there’s more hope when it comes to rural economic development. “When we think as how work has evolved—the pandemic put remote work on steroids. Some of that will come back down but the remote trend was increasing even before the pandemic,” she said.
“As we have the increase in remote work there are a lot of people who would prefer to live in places with less traffic, less congestion with a little bit of land and a nice view. A lot of those places are in rural areas,” said Weinstein.
Alex Benishek, who heads a program called Mattoon in Motion, will give conference attendees details on a program to attract remote workers to Mattoon, a town of about 16,000 located 100 miles southeast of Peoria. The program involves an incentive package worth about $12,000 to families who make a commitment to move to the area. Benishek said five families who have taken advantage of the program are expected to move there this summer.
Institute director Chris Merrett said Mattoon offers affordable, dependable broadband and also benefits from being located near an interstate highway and is a town with passenger rail service. Small towns need to examine what assets they have, he said. “Then the challenge is can you bundle them and market them to attract people?” said Merrett.
Another conference speaker, Cole McDaniel, economic development director in Canton, added that another concern for towns that seek to attract remote workers—in addition to broadband—is insuring that childcare is available for young families.
