Material Hardship Across Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Counties in the United States: 2013-2021

Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) (N = 69,735), this paper analyzes wellbeing across nonmetropolitan-metropolitan areas through the lens of material hardship-characterized here as a household's inability to purchase sufficient healthy foods, live in structurally safe homes, or pay bills. This approach mirrors that of other social scientists who depict poverty as not only the absence of income, but also the inability to live well. Bivariate linear probability models indicate that nonmetropolitan households face substantively greater risks of not securing enough healthy food (b = 0.026, p < 0.001), living in a poor-quality housing unit (b = 0.014, p < 0.05), and experiencing any form of hardship (b = 0.020, p < 0.05) relative to metropolitan households. However, disparities disappear after accounting for demographic and household characteristics. In the case of bill-paying hardship, nonmetropolitan households exhibit lower risks of hardship than metropolitan settings in the final models (b = -0.009, p < 0.05). Decomposition models indicate that lower incomes and elevated prevalence of disability among nonmetropolitan households explain many of the initial disparities evidenced in bivariate models.