Alabama gets a bad rap, really. For whatever reason there was legislation passed many years ago that all roads where mail is delivered (which is pretty much everywhere) must be paved. There are almost no unpaved residential roads in Alabama. As a result, there has been significant infrastructural improvement since then.
Arkansas has seen many of there rural routes paved over the past 15 years, but not all of them. My Arkansas family lives on a paved road today, but it wasn't paved until a few years ago. They don't live in trailer parks, they live on dairy farms.
I live in Missouri now, and there are many, many unpaved roads here. For all of the stereotyping of the deep south, in Missouri it is not uncommon to see ruddy faced, mullet wearing men, clad in wife-beater tee-shirts, walking out of convenience stores carrying a case of Budweiser. Heck, in Missouri you can buy liquor off of the shelf at convenience stores and even Walmart. Two years ago I was in Southeast Ohio (Ripley to Manchester area) and I saw tons of trashy looking trailers - one even had a confederate flag. My wife and I stopped at a "Dairy Diner" in Ripley and overheard a racist conversation - true story.
I know all of Arkansas is not back-woods. There are very well developed areas, however the practice of incorporating every town with 100 people or more has its down side. Rural farming towns don't have the resources to invest in infrastructure and the total state population is less than 3 million. Alabama has been working on significant infrastructure upgrades for 40 years. Even Mississippi has been more progressive...for all of the negativity toward Mississippi's educational system, it was the first state in the country to have computers with high-speed internet access in every classroom of every public school in the state - no joke. The schools there catch heck for being sub-par, however it is actually the legacy of integration. Almost every town in Mississippi has a private school that is filled with a significant percentage of the white middle class kids (the ones who would be in public schools in other states). As a result, public schools have a higher percentage of other ethnic minority groups, and that drives standardized test scores down; that is not a racist statement, any anthropologist will tell you that standardized tests are notorious for being racially biased. Private schools don't report standardized test scores, so when the national reports come out, Mississippi is at the bottom...fwiw I did significant study in Missiology because I was considering doing a PhD in intercultural studies.
