Horner’s Rural Route By Bill Horner Rural Route is a Business North Carolina column authored by veteran journalist Bill Horner. He focuses on key issues in less populated parts of the state.
Sustainability threats
North Carolina shows few signs of losing its crown as the nation’s best state for business. As the meter clicks over to a new year, though, a disquieting melange of factors poses threats to business success and sustainability in our state’s rural spaces.
Here are four persistent pain points for the state’s rural areas:
WORK FORCE
The driver: the tenuous nature of the rural labor force — and a relatively weak pipeline — has resulted in troubling imbalances.
North Carolina earns its “best in business” moniker in part because of strong population and job growth. But for rural businesses, attracting, growing and retaining workforce is usually a function of proximity to large population centers.
The nature of isolation and population density helps account for the fact that more than half of North Carolina’s rural workforce (51.1%) is employed by small businesses, compared with 40.9% in urban areas. More than one-fifth in rural N.C. work in companies with fewer than 20 employees.
Workforce issues are compounded by a lower rural labor participation rate. The percentage of those
16 and older working or looking for work is just 56.3% in rural N.C., compared with 68.3% in the state’s urban areas.
And too often, when there is a convergence of available employees and open positions in rural markets, the pieces don’t fit. Too few ready, willing workers have skillsets that qualify them for better-paying jobs, manufacturers have told me.
A positive: North Carolina’s workforce development infrastructure is robust, aided by the state’s top-tier community college system. But Reginald Speight, the assistant secretary for Rural Economic Development at N.C. Commerce, suggests the state has overextended its reliance on community colleges — asking too much, providing too little funding and failing to adequately backstop campuses.
“The community college system is in an ebb and flow situation,” he says, hiring people to prepare for job training programs in partnerships with new industry, for example.
“And then it’s going to drop off, and you can’t sustain your business model that way,” Speight says. “So because of that, they’re always looking for and losing talented people, and then starting over. We have to be at a point where we can keep them at some type of what I call ‘level funding,’ but a level of enough funding to not only recruit the talented people, but to retain them. And then, if we’re doing things like that to prepare for businesses, it’s just a matter of scaling up or scaling down for the workforce.”
HOUSING
The driver: Low inventory and less “missing middle” housing stock has created barriers of affordability and availability.
This isn’t new. Even in a buyer’s market, finding affordable housing is an impediment for relocating workers everywhere in N.C. But simple supply and demand economics make it exponentially more daunting in rural spaces.
Elevated prices and borrowing costs and a constrained inventory are keeping many buyers sidelined. I heard stories from rural employers throughout 2025 about new hires who ended up walking away from a job because they couldn’t find housing they could afford close enough to their workplace.
“Everywhere we go, we get talked to about housing,” says Dalton Bailey, the research and data manager for the NC Rural Center, a Raleigh-based nonprofit. “And more and more it’s about workforce housing. Folks will say that sometimes there’s availability for really nice, upscale housing, and then they have housing for super-low income folks. But there’s this missing middle where somebody who might work at a factory or at a hospital in the area, or be a teacher.”
“Missing middle” housing — a term also referring to medium-density residences such as duplexes, townhomes, or multiplex dwellings — would be a welcome boon in most rural towns.
Speight suggests a surge there isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Continued demand for higher-priced homes — way above the state’s median of just under $390,000 — is anchoring builders there. He shared what one builder told him after inquiring why there wasn’t more affordable housing here.
“He said, ‘Let me just be honest with you,’” Speight told me. “‘If someone is willing to pay me to build a $600,000 house, I’m going to build a $600,000 house. My business model is, if you want it, and I build it, and I tell you how much it’s going to cost, and you tell me to build it anyway, then I’m going to build it — because I’m a builder.’”
And until then, prices won’t go down.
“The market out there,” Speight says, “just isn’t friendly for affordable housing,”
Chris Estes, the new chief programs officer at the NC Rural Center, says conversations about housing in rural spaces have changed.
“Housing comes up in a way that it never did 15 years ago,” he told me. “It’s affordability … but in some places, there’s just no decent housing there, or there’s no place to rent if you’re not ready to buy, and the only place you can go is a mobile home park that’s just really crappy and actually too expensive.”
ACCESSIBLE HEALTHCARE
The driver: medical professional shortages, churn and the threat of clinic and hospital closures exacerbate existing negative health outcomes already plaguing rural areas.
If you live in a rural space, you start at a disadvantage. Life expectancy for residents in rural North Carolina is 10% less than those living in urban areas. Since 2005, a dozen rural hospitals have closed. If you’re building a business, the unrelenting shortage of healthcare workers — there are nearly three times as many physicians per capita in urban areas than rural, for example — complicates attracting workers.
Worse news is this trend: the natural-cause mortality rate for people ages 25 to 54 in North Carolina’s rural areas, which was 6% higher than city folk back in 1999, has widened to 43%. Worse yet: healthcare professionals, particularly in western N.C., cite a rapidly growing need for more behavioral and mental health services, particularly among the young — adding to the accessibility quagmire.
One positive sign is the growth of telehealth care. But poor broadband access, felt mainly in rural areas, is a nullifying factor.
CHILDCARE
The driver: Childcare access is problematic in most rural areas.
Like housing, childcare availability across our state is abysmal. On average, five families compete for every one licensed childcare spot in North Carolina. Nearly half (46.2%) of N.C. families live in a childcare desert as defined by the Center for American Progress, and just 12.4% of families can afford infant childcare.
“If you want people to have kids and you also want them to work, childcare has to be available and affordable,” Bailey says.
Estes points out most of the world’s leading economies see childcare much differently than in the U.S.
“There’s been a struggle for the business world in particular to understand that infrastructure includes things like childcare for businesses,” he says. “Every place in the world you go where economies are doing well in a first world setting, childcare is thought of … Everywhere we go in rural, it’s a huge issue.
“When people don’t have adequate child care, it’s hard to be on time [for work]. It’s hard to cover. You miss time. I don’t know what all the answers are, but I know that there are those kinds of barriers. And we’re not used to thinking about that in rural. We’re thinking, ‘Just get jobs and people will go to work, and they’ll figure it out.’”
More could be added to this list, including access to capital, socio-economic
inequalities, a fast-aging demographic and infrastructure disparities and headwinds
from Hurricane Helene.
Ultimately, Estes contends, rural prosperity emerges from a mixture of sustainability and breadth. Rural “has generally had things done to it,” and business success tends to be driven by a small number of people, he says. Prosperity comes by figuring out how to balance those out and find ways to meet pain points head-on.
Workforce, housing, healthcare accessibility and childcare are rural’s interlopers. Shared priorities around those, and alignment around progress, Estes and others contend, should be goals for rural N.C. in 2026. ■
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FOR URBAN TO SUCCEED, RURAL NEEDS STABILITY
Kenny Sherin was raised on leased farmland in the shadow of the U.S. 74 corridor in Union County. Development was fast encroaching, given the area’s proximity to Charlotte, and Sherin’s father realized a future in farming there “was going to be next to impossible.”
“He could see the writing on the wall,” Sherin, the community and economic development program manager at N.C. State’s Cooperative Extension office, remembers. “He said, ‘Go do something else.’”
Sherin did, but he stayed rural: after studying forestry at N.C. State and earning a PhD in Rural Sociology and Community Development at the University of Missouri, Sherin eventually spent nearly eight years as part of South Dakota State University’s Extension team. A reminder from his boss there still resonates.
“He would say, ‘If you’ve seen one rural community … you’ve seen one rural community,’” he said. “The issues facing rural communities are very diverse. Sure, there are some of the same general things, but they can be as diverse in the way that every rural community is diverse.”
The NC Rural Center’s Chris Estes said it’s common for those not living in rural spaces to look at, and think about, rural in similar ways, and to not recognize unique problems existing there.
“There’s this sort of Mayberry-esque fantasy about rural,” he said. “People think that rural is charming, and that it’s fun to go to the teapot museum, or the whatever … And we like going to Boone and Blowing Rock or stopping in Little Washington, like this sort of Disneyland version of rural. Or people think that rural is all small farmers. That perpetuates across the country.”
Education and robust discussion about the value of rural, he believes, needs to occur across all of North Carolina.
“Because rural doesn’t talk about itself in that way,” Estes said. “When you talk to rural people, most of them can tell you what’s wrong before they can tell you what they have.”
During his time in South Dakota, Sherin’s department shifted its name from “Community Development” to “Community Vitality.”
“In North Carolina, we still call it ‘rural development,’” he said. “‘Vitality’ was the USDA’s term, and we wanted to align with that. To us it meant ‘thrive’ — not just sustaining, but fostering a more active, thriving mindset.”
For rural spaces to be more vital, Estes said, we must spend more time “thinking bigger and longer and deeper about how we get there.”
“Urban,” Estes contends, “is not going to be successful without rural being successful … The point we usually try to make about the myth is that they aren’t two separate spaces. They are interdependent and interconnected.”
