It’s not just urban dwellers who have faced difficulties paying the rent during the past year as the pandemic upended the economy. Renters in rural New England have faced many of the same affordability challenges, according to a report released yesterday by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s New England Public Policy Center, the Associated Press reported. While the pandemic may not be having as large a health impact on New England’s rural areas as it’s had on its cities, it’s having a similar economic impact due to businesses closures and restrictions on economic activity aimed at limiting the spread of the virus. The share of jobs lost in rural New England communities has been large, even though these areas have seen fewer cases of COVID-19 relative to their population size compared with the region’s urban areas, the report found. That’s in contrast with the experience in much of the rest of the country, where rural areas nationally had seen more COVID-19 cases relative to their population size but had lost a smaller share of jobs.
