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This. There are all kinds of rural US towns with existing infrastructure that are slipping beneath the waves because there aren't any jobs. Not everyone wants
by gozur88 10y ago
This. There are all kinds of rural US towns with existing infrastructure that are slipping beneath the waves because there aren't any jobs. Not everyone wants to live in Manhattan - if I could telecommute from a more rural location I would.
- ghaff 10y agoThe town I live in is in pretty good shape because it's on the outer ring of the Boston commuting radius--with pretty good rail. Plus until quite recently essentially all Boston tech was west of the city anyway. But this idea that, if only we herded everyone into cities and stopped spending on other infrastructure, everything would be great is... silly.
- zyxley 10y agoNew England, and indeed much of the East Coast, is a far cry from the rest of the country. The width of the entire state of Massachusetts is smaller than the distance between some neighboring towns in the Midwest.
- ghaff 10y agoYes, but the point remains that all those spread-out towns already exist. Unless they're actually abandoned we're not going to bulldoze them. The difference is that they're not within daily/weekly commuting distances of tech centers as are many of the outlying areas of most tech centers--the Bay Area being something of an exception. So living there would be true remote working as opposed to just not living in a desired city core.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoMassacheusetts is almost 200 miles wide, I'm having a little bit of trouble picturing places that are that far removed from the nearest town outside of places like the empty parts of Nevada or Wyoming.
- gozur88 10y agoI guess it depends on your definition of "nearest town". By the official "settlement hierarchy", in which a thousand souls or more comprise a town, that's true. Once you get into 20k or 30k, though, it's pretty easy to find places in the West or Midwest that are more than 200 miles from the nearest town of that size.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoThere's a pretty wide gap between "1k" and "20k". Also I don't have any GIS tools handy but I started poking around with google maps and 200 miles is a long way even in the west, It looks like all of Nebraska is within 200 miles of a 20k city, and so is almost all of Texas except maybe down by Big Bend.
- gozur88 10y ago>There's a pretty wide gap between "1k" and "20k". That's true. I was a little surprised 1k is large enough to be considered a town.
- icebraining 10y agothis idea that, if only we herded everyone into cities and stopped spending on other infrastructure, everything would be great is... silly. As the person who started this thread, I agree, that idea that nobody argued for is indeed silly. All I said is that small towns are inefficient for the typical citizen. Nobody claimed that eliminating small towns would make "everything great".