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Abstract
Rural America has historically experienced unique population challenges, and the consequences felt today shape the needs and priorities of advocacy work for affordable housing. Beginning with massive out-migration during the Industrial Revolution, the trend of population movement towards cities partially reversed recently. In-migration of urban residents to rural areas, associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and industry shifts towards tourism, have seriously strained minimal rural resources. These changes and other external economic factors sparked a housing crisis across much of the rural United States, where baseline housing stock is insufficient, market rate homeownership has become impossible for middle-income locals, and affordable rental housing is not being developed. Existing research identifies this phenomenon in parts of the country as “rural gentrification,” a relationship of new residents to long-time locals and wealthy second homeowners to struggling renters. Grassroots affordable development exists in some rural towns to try to address these issues; housing support services and public housing authorities are a growing presence in non-metropolitan counties. But the energy behind them is complex, representative of a multifaceted picture of gentrification, and those dedicating the most resources towards affordable housing advocacy are often newcomers and more advantaged homeowners. This research takes the state of Washington as a subject, where historic community land trusts, tech millionaires, and rural poverty coexist. Through an interview-based study of leadership in rural housing groups across the state, this project attempts to explain what motivates housing organizers, and how in-migration to rural areas both creates a problem and offers the tools to address it. I demonstrate that in the unique rural context, advocacy plays an outsized role in shaping organizers’ small communities. Individuals with specific identities and priorities mobilize financial and social capital towards different types of affordable housing development, dictating not just the built environment but social class outcomes as well.