The town didn’t protect its young economically when it had the chance, and how there are no young people left to take care of the elderly.

    Raising the money was the “easy part,” Mosbrucker says. “Staffing is going to be the hard part.” Covid-19 exacerbated an existing labor shortage in rural North Dakota, which had been losing population for decades as small farms merged and mechanization displaced workers, scattering young people to Bismarck, Fargo, Minneapolis and other cities.

    Mott lost more than a third of its population between 1990 and 2020, leaving it with a median age of 49. (The median in Fargo, the state’s most populous city, is just above 31.) Reopening the nursing home will be key to stanching the flow of families out of the area, says Charlotte Aldinger, who grew up on a farm nearby and moved back from Bismarck with her family in 2012.