Rural rising: Economic development strategies for America’s heartland

In downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi, in a repurposed freight depot built in 1918 for the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, sits the Delta Blues Museum. The state’s oldest music museum, it is central to the growing tourism industry in the Mississippi Delta, “the land where the blues began”—once home to John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Yet on March 18, 2020, as the COVID-19 crisis escalated across the United States, the museum was forced to temporarily close its doors. Tourism across the country slowed to a trickle, and Clarksdale’s Coahoma County—85 miles from Memphis, 77 percent Black, and with 35 percent of its population living in poverty as of 2019—suddenly lost one of its main sources of income and employment. By April 2020, the county’s unemployment rate had reached about 20 percent.

Meanwhile, about 1,000 miles northwest, in rural Chase County, Nebraska, the unemployment rate in April 2020 was only 2.2 percent. Businesses struggled to fill positions and attract workers; the poverty rate in Chase County was lower than the US average and remains so today.

Click here to view the original article from McKinsey & Company.