The story flips if you use the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which adjusts for cost of living: https://www.irp.wisc.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Focus.... Rural poverty has consistently been similar to urban poverty, and was measurably lower during the great recession. Rural areas also have lower long-term poverty (where a family was poor for two successive measurement years). About 4% in 2016 for rural areas, versus 5.5% in urban areas.

The states with the lowest SPM poverty rates are midwestern states with large rural populations, like Iowa and Nebraska: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ.... (California's poverty rate is almost double those states'.)

Sure, but during a recession no one is moving into those areas and a LOT of unemployed are moving AWAY from them. The metrics look good because they misrepresent what’s actually happening.

Actually the opposite is true: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/90556/eib-200..... There was a significant rural to urban net migration during boom economies which slowed to zero during both the early 2000s recession and the 2008 recession. And in fact there was a small migration from urban back to rural during the last recession.

The unemployment rate in Iowa peaked at a little more than half the national unemployment rate in 2009-2010.

That's objectively and measurably false.

The link you provided appears to support my assertion. The vast majority of rural lands in the US have relatively low poverty rates, similar to non-rural poverty rates. A relatively small number of regions with extremely high poverty rates skew the national average, though only by a few percentage points, and in large parts of the US the poverty rates are effectively the same across rural and non-rural populations. Most of the rural US is not Appalachia. Maybe not wealthy but definitely middle class.

As noted at your link, many of the extremely poor rural areas skewing the averages are Native American reservations. How do you propose to make them relocate to cities?