A sale may not yield funds to finance a move to other housing. Lower values also mean that there less inducement to keep up maintenance and make improvements. Isolation and other factors of geography also present a barrier. For the rural elderly, age, lack of education, a sense of stigma and low incomes may mean a lack of knowledge of social programs or a reluctance to use them. Thus the rural elderly may linger on in substandard homes that will only become more dilapidated with time 3 .
Poverty rates are consistently higher in nonmetropolitan areas than in metro areas.
Data from the 1990 Census of Population and Housing indicates that the poverty rate for persons age 65 and over was 15.6 percent in nonmetro areas versus 14.6 percent in central cities and 8.1 percent in the suburbs. An older African-American or Hispanic person is much more likely to be poor if he or she lives in a nonmetropolitan area. Poverty in some rural sub-groups is even more shocking. For example, African-American elderly women living alone in nonmetro areas had a poverty rate of nearly 70 percent in 1990. This is one of the highest poverty rates reported by the Census for any population sub-group.