Communities in Transition

Iowa has some 955 incorporated places or communities.  While the number of communities has declined ever so slightly over the past century, the ability of many of them to continue to exist as governing structures masks an important change that began a century ago as farm mechanization encouraged operating family farmers to put more land under the plow.  The most pronounced surge in farm consolidation and decline of rural communities and counties occurred with the farm crisis of the 1980s which was the bust that followed a boom in exports and agricultural prices and a run-up in land prices.  During the 1970s, only 44 of Iowa’s 99 counties experienced population decline, while during the bust years of the 1980s all but seven counties experienced population loss.  While the early 1980s were recession years for the nation as a whole, Iowa climbed even more slowly out of the economic slump, because of the continued stagnation of the farm economy and the decline in Iowa’s manufacturing sector, which was—and is--also heavily dependent on the farm economy.  The 1990s saw widespread recovery and nearly half of those counties that had lost population were able to reverse directions.  The economic slowdown of the first half of the current decade and continued deindustrialization in the U.S. and in Iowa spelled renewed decline of more than twenty percent of Iowa’s counties and many of  its communities.  

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