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Serious question from someone who flinches at living more than ten minutes' walk from a train station and won't rent anything that doesn't have a crackerjack s

Serious question from someone who flinches at living more than ten minutes' walk from a train station and won't rent anything that doesn't have a crackerjack shower with painfully hot water and enough pressure to bruise, and an internet connection that sees less than a few minutes degraded service a year (although for speed, I actually don't demand that much - I'm happy with a couple of megabytes per second); why do people live there? That's a genuine question; not "why" as said to imply that there is no reason. There must be reasons. I just don't know what they are. Not generalities, please. I'm interested in first-hand information from people who actually live or lived there. Did you move to such a place? Why? What's the economy based on? Does it generate enough money to be self-sustaining, or does it exist through inertia? In areas with such low density of people, what jobs exist? Is it all farming or other such? How many people living there might actually like to move, but can't?

brownbat 9y ago
I think it's an interesting topic, more people should want to learn about life in other circumstances, so I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Maybe just because no one has come by with an answer. Not that it's what you're looking for, but this reminds me of Kacey Musgraves, who has some anti-country songs about the pain and false promises of small town life in a changing America. Merry Go Round and Blowin Smoke especially. There's some social psychology research on "sense of place" that covers how drawn people are to staying in the place where they grew up, which makes it hard for some to leave. The Rum Diary (the novel, can't vouch for the film) is kind of a meditation on this too, though about Puerto Rico instead of the rural midwest.
darkstar999 9y ago
Farming and ranching. Case closed. Also, the rural population has quite a different culture than what you are used to. They don't _crave_ internet. Some of them likely ask the same thing about your culture. Why do you like living so close to each other? Everything is so fast and overwhelming.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  "Farming and ranching. Case closed." Is it? Are you a farmer or rancher? Why's it necessary to live so remotely? Is it not possible for a town to support farming and ranching? Is it necessary for everyone involved to live so remotely? Given the huge areas involved, living on the farm/ranch makes you local to one small part of it but still remote from all the rest, so why the need to live there? "Why do you like living so close to each other?" I don't, but it's the cost of having the things I do want. I want fast, reliable, cheap internet. I want my other utilities to be reliable as well. I want to be able to walk ten minutes to a mainline train station - it gives me a lot of opportunities very easily, needing nothing more than train fare. The density of people creates a lot of other opportunities; things that are wildly uneconomical in low-density communities become viable. Range of jobs, range of businesses for me to patronise, leisure opportunities. It's really about all those opportunities, and the people that make them. When I want to learn something, I just find a local class. If there isn't a local class, it's an hour from my door on foot and by train to central London (and I don't even live in a county adjacent to London), and there the opportunities increase by another order of magnitude. We don't (necessarily) like living close to each other; we like all the opportunities that are created by that - economic and self-development - and we like the many things that become economical in doing so (cheap, reliable utilities and infrastructure and niche businesses and all the rest that I mentioned above).
  - Aloha 9y ago
    Both Farming and Ranching require a sizable amount of land to be viable. It's much more viable to live on the land you farm (or ranch on), than it is to live in town. Beyond that, cities create higher land values that tend to make farming or ranching non-viable. That said, even rural towns are very underserved in the US.
- protomyth 9y ago
  My usage stats on our internet would disagree. Of course I’ve visited the college on weekends and found folks parked in the parking lot using the school’s wifi. I figure it’s a public service.
- 9y ago
_lm_ 9y ago
I live in a ruralish area--20 minute drive from the local university, but I'm surrounded by farms. I like the solitude and the space. I can't see any of my neighbors--the closest I get to that is seeing their utility pole light through the trees in the fall/winter. For the same price/month as a 1-bedroom, 1-car garage condo in town, I get a 3-bedroom house + drive-in basement + pole barn. Couldn't care less about the house, but the space in the basement is nice for bigger projects. I see a lot of folks out this way with backyard shops too. I keep a few chickens; if I wanted I could have a huge garden too. Plenty of people keep cows, horses, chickens, etc. Power is through a co-op; in my experience it's both cheaper and more reliable than the in-town utilities. Well water tastes good and works as long as I have power. Internet I get through a WISP, it's not fast nor cheap but it's better than satellite (and, at the time, cell service). I did put up a 50' tower for that, which was quite an adventure. I'm a grad student; the university is perhaps the biggest employer in the area but there are still some factory jobs and also some commercial science jobs in the area. My landlord used to be the butcher and farmed/raised cattle in his 'spare' time. Sadly, there's significantly fewer local businesses in the area than there were a decade or two ago, according to folks who have been here that long.
rayiner 9y ago
I mean, people live different places for various reasons. If you want to have a horse, for example, you need a certain amount of acres. I live near Annapolis, MD, but go 10 minutes west and it's horse farms. The bigger question is: to what degree should people in the city subsidize that lifestyle? People talk about treating the internet "like a utility." But much of the county I live in doesn't have public water/sewer (many places more than 20 miles outside DC don't have public water/sewer). People pay to have a well/septic system built. We don't force the folks in the city to pay a lot more for water/sewer to subsidize the folks in rural areas. We just got public water/sewer where we live and we're paying off a $25,000 tax bill for the hookup charges.
- cesarb 9y ago
  > People talk about treating the internet "like a utility." But much of the county I live in doesn't have public water/sewer [...] The Internet is more like electricity or telephony than water/sewer. Are these places connected to the public power grid, or do they depend on generators? Could the power poles be used for Internet wiring?
  - rayiner 9y ago
    The Internet is much more like water/sewer. If you're not on the public water/sewer, you can always dig a well/build a septic system. Likewise, even in Saguache County, you can get satellite internet (12 down, 3 up). Yes, it's more expensive and more limiting, but so is building a well/septic system (both together can be $20,000+ easily). With electricity, it's highly impractical not to be on the grid (though that's changing these days with wind/solar). Yes, you could run wired internet along the power poles, but who is going to pay for it? The electric grid was built during the Depression when labor was cheap. You couldn't do it today. (Just like NYC built its subway system at the turn of the 20th century, but the cost would be prohibitive today). And it'd be one thing if these people were cut off from job applications/wikipedia/etc. But spending a bunch of money to wire up rural places that can get satellite/wireless seems like a huge waste of public money to me when there are starving kids, etc.
resu_nimda 9y ago
I don't live there, but I do live in a remote part of California, near the Mendocino/Humboldt county line. It's 20 minutes to the post office and about an hour to the nearest "real" town. In some ways it's more isolated than the area described in the article, because of how steep and dense the terrain is (read up on the Lost Coast if you're interested). The only available Internet is satellite (which sucks, it's like a phone plan with a certain amount of data and after that you're severely throttled). I moved up here recently after working as a developer in SF for a few years, so my situation and my reasons are a bit different than most of the local population. I did it because it is a beautiful place, I essentially live in a forest with no real neighbors. I have space to grow food and build things and just feel relaxed and free (I love the energy of the city but the lack of space gives me anxiety). Everyone I meet up here seems happy, friendly, and helpful. I feel more connected to the local community because it's not a writhing mass of millions of people. If you ever go camping for a few days and feel kind of rejuvenated by nature, it's like that, except permanent. As for the economy, that is definitely an interesting question. This area was previously sustained by massive logging operations, and when that was curtailed things started going into decline (lot of abandoned/decrepit buildings around). Now there's a very strange shadow economy based on marijuana farming, that is starting to transition into a lawful enterprise. My own economic interests are around lodging/hospitality/resort type offerings. I would say most people that live in the area like it and don't have any interest in moving to a city or something like that. I don't like calling it a "slower pace of life" but of course it is in some ways. We're not running around innovating and pushing the boundaries of technology and whatnot, but a lot of the people I know who are doing that don't seem very happy either.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  My own economic interests are around lodging/hospitality/resort type offerings. I do see that; areas whose economy is primarily based on people from cities/towns coming to spend their money in that area. I'm sure economists have a term for that; it's not producing "value" (for want of a better term) in the same way that those cities/towns do. It's where some of the "value" produced in those other areas gets spent. I do need a better term than "value" here. That's not quite the term I mean. Maybe economists have a suitable term for it.
bane 9y ago
For part of my childhood, my family lived in a fairly remote area right at the start of the Appalachian mountains. The nearest "restaurant" was a gas station 30 minutes away by highway. I've never quite cottoned on to why we moved there, but it seems to have been a combination of my parents desire to buy a home and, not making much money, headed away from the nearest city until the real estate prices became affordable. This combined with a strong sort of (what I'll call) anti-social tendencies on the part of my father (who'd probably describe it more as a desire to be a self-made person with lots of individual freedoms and not having to deal with all the negotiations of living near other people). The people who lived near us seemed to be a mix of people like my parents who just wanted lots of personal space and privacy and were willing to deal with all the time and money wastes that come with that lifestyle, and generational locals who were often very poor (several of my neighbors didn't even have running water in their homes, still had outhouses and often hunted for the majority of their protein and family calories). I personally hated it and ran into the city as I could afford as quickly as I could. But not that I'm getting older I'm also starting to want to remove the hassle of dealing with neighbors and am thinking of looking for a new place to live with more privacy. One difference, I'm much more affluent than my parents and am instead trying to find the lifestyle I want using raw monetary power to live closer in to the local urban centers.
nateberkopec 9y ago
I moved to Taos, New Mexico last year after 8 years in NYC. Taos has about ~5,000 people. I'm a freelance developer and author. It's one of the most beautiful places in America, in my opinion. There's arts, culture, and incredible access to the outdoors. I ski all winter. The internet is actually pretty decent here if you're in the right part of town. Some people have fiber.
true_religion 9y ago
My husband grew up in Pulaski, Virginia which out in the depths of nowhere to most people in Virginia, but got Comcast internet (poorly), Verizon (barely), and 251 acres of land for less than $200,000 dollars. His family moved out there to satisfy his father's dream of being a gentleman farmer. He moved away after university because neither he nor his father are actually very good farmers. I get a bit wistful about it, since it is beautiful countryside and I'd like to live there but the lack of amenities keep me away. Virginia as a whole has lots of empty land, so simply sitting 1.5 hours (during rush hour) outside of DC is enough plop one down in farmland.
aperrien 9y ago
Much of the time, it's because their parents or grandparents live there. Having family connections makes it hard to move away from a place, unless you like risk. Which, of course is how those families got there in the first place...
- EliRivers 9y ago
  Yes, from some of the answers above it's not so simple as farming and ranching. Sounds like there are many poor people living in what we might consider poverty; I wonder how many would prefer a life working a job and lifestyle in a town or city but simply can't make that move for lack of money, education, connections.

brownbat 9y ago

I think it's an interesting topic, more people should want to learn about life in other circumstances, so I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Maybe just because no one has come by with an answer. Not that it's what you're looking for, but this reminds me of Kacey Musgraves, who has some anti-country songs about the pain and false promises of small town life in a changing America. Merry Go Round and Blowin Smoke especially. There's some social psychology research on "sense of place" that covers how drawn people are to staying in the place where they grew up, which makes it hard for some to leave. The Rum Diary (the novel, can't vouch for the film) is kind of a meditation on this too, though about Puerto Rico instead of the rural midwest.

darkstar999 9y ago

Farming and ranching. Case closed. Also, the rural population has quite a different culture than what you are used to. They don't _crave_ internet. Some of them likely ask the same thing about your culture. Why do you like living so close to each other? Everything is so fast and overwhelming.

EliRivers 9y ago
"Farming and ranching. Case closed." Is it? Are you a farmer or rancher? Why's it necessary to live so remotely? Is it not possible for a town to support farming and ranching? Is it necessary for everyone involved to live so remotely? Given the huge areas involved, living on the farm/ranch makes you local to one small part of it but still remote from all the rest, so why the need to live there? "Why do you like living so close to each other?" I don't, but it's the cost of having the things I do want. I want fast, reliable, cheap internet. I want my other utilities to be reliable as well. I want to be able to walk ten minutes to a mainline train station - it gives me a lot of opportunities very easily, needing nothing more than train fare. The density of people creates a lot of other opportunities; things that are wildly uneconomical in low-density communities become viable. Range of jobs, range of businesses for me to patronise, leisure opportunities. It's really about all those opportunities, and the people that make them. When I want to learn something, I just find a local class. If there isn't a local class, it's an hour from my door on foot and by train to central London (and I don't even live in a county adjacent to London), and there the opportunities increase by another order of magnitude. We don't (necessarily) like living close to each other; we like all the opportunities that are created by that - economic and self-development - and we like the many things that become economical in doing so (cheap, reliable utilities and infrastructure and niche businesses and all the rest that I mentioned above).
- Aloha 9y ago
  Both Farming and Ranching require a sizable amount of land to be viable. It's much more viable to live on the land you farm (or ranch on), than it is to live in town. Beyond that, cities create higher land values that tend to make farming or ranching non-viable. That said, even rural towns are very underserved in the US.
protomyth 9y ago
My usage stats on our internet would disagree. Of course I’ve visited the college on weekends and found folks parked in the parking lot using the school’s wifi. I figure it’s a public service.
9y ago

_lm_ 9y ago

I live in a ruralish area--20 minute drive from the local university, but I'm surrounded by farms. I like the solitude and the space. I can't see any of my neighbors--the closest I get to that is seeing their utility pole light through the trees in the fall/winter. For the same price/month as a 1-bedroom, 1-car garage condo in town, I get a 3-bedroom house + drive-in basement + pole barn. Couldn't care less about the house, but the space in the basement is nice for bigger projects. I see a lot of folks out this way with backyard shops too. I keep a few chickens; if I wanted I could have a huge garden too. Plenty of people keep cows, horses, chickens, etc. Power is through a co-op; in my experience it's both cheaper and more reliable than the in-town utilities. Well water tastes good and works as long as I have power. Internet I get through a WISP, it's not fast nor cheap but it's better than satellite (and, at the time, cell service). I did put up a 50' tower for that, which was quite an adventure. I'm a grad student; the university is perhaps the biggest employer in the area but there are still some factory jobs and also some commercial science jobs in the area. My landlord used to be the butcher and farmed/raised cattle in his 'spare' time. Sadly, there's significantly fewer local businesses in the area than there were a decade or two ago, according to folks who have been here that long.

rayiner 9y ago

I mean, people live different places for various reasons. If you want to have a horse, for example, you need a certain amount of acres. I live near Annapolis, MD, but go 10 minutes west and it's horse farms. The bigger question is: to what degree should people in the city subsidize that lifestyle? People talk about treating the internet "like a utility." But much of the county I live in doesn't have public water/sewer (many places more than 20 miles outside DC don't have public water/sewer). People pay to have a well/septic system built. We don't force the folks in the city to pay a lot more for water/sewer to subsidize the folks in rural areas. We just got public water/sewer where we live and we're paying off a $25,000 tax bill for the hookup charges.

cesarb 9y ago
> People talk about treating the internet "like a utility." But much of the county I live in doesn't have public water/sewer [...] The Internet is more like electricity or telephony than water/sewer. Are these places connected to the public power grid, or do they depend on generators? Could the power poles be used for Internet wiring?
- rayiner 9y ago
  The Internet is much more like water/sewer. If you're not on the public water/sewer, you can always dig a well/build a septic system. Likewise, even in Saguache County, you can get satellite internet (12 down, 3 up). Yes, it's more expensive and more limiting, but so is building a well/septic system (both together can be $20,000+ easily). With electricity, it's highly impractical not to be on the grid (though that's changing these days with wind/solar). Yes, you could run wired internet along the power poles, but who is going to pay for it? The electric grid was built during the Depression when labor was cheap. You couldn't do it today. (Just like NYC built its subway system at the turn of the 20th century, but the cost would be prohibitive today). And it'd be one thing if these people were cut off from job applications/wikipedia/etc. But spending a bunch of money to wire up rural places that can get satellite/wireless seems like a huge waste of public money to me when there are starving kids, etc.

resu_nimda 9y ago

I don't live there, but I do live in a remote part of California, near the Mendocino/Humboldt county line. It's 20 minutes to the post office and about an hour to the nearest "real" town. In some ways it's more isolated than the area described in the article, because of how steep and dense the terrain is (read up on the Lost Coast if you're interested). The only available Internet is satellite (which sucks, it's like a phone plan with a certain amount of data and after that you're severely throttled). I moved up here recently after working as a developer in SF for a few years, so my situation and my reasons are a bit different than most of the local population. I did it because it is a beautiful place, I essentially live in a forest with no real neighbors. I have space to grow food and build things and just feel relaxed and free (I love the energy of the city but the lack of space gives me anxiety). Everyone I meet up here seems happy, friendly, and helpful. I feel more connected to the local community because it's not a writhing mass of millions of people. If you ever go camping for a few days and feel kind of rejuvenated by nature, it's like that, except permanent. As for the economy, that is definitely an interesting question. This area was previously sustained by massive logging operations, and when that was curtailed things started going into decline (lot of abandoned/decrepit buildings around). Now there's a very strange shadow economy based on marijuana farming, that is starting to transition into a lawful enterprise. My own economic interests are around lodging/hospitality/resort type offerings. I would say most people that live in the area like it and don't have any interest in moving to a city or something like that. I don't like calling it a "slower pace of life" but of course it is in some ways. We're not running around innovating and pushing the boundaries of technology and whatnot, but a lot of the people I know who are doing that don't seem very happy either.

EliRivers 9y ago
My own economic interests are around lodging/hospitality/resort type offerings. I do see that; areas whose economy is primarily based on people from cities/towns coming to spend their money in that area. I'm sure economists have a term for that; it's not producing "value" (for want of a better term) in the same way that those cities/towns do. It's where some of the "value" produced in those other areas gets spent. I do need a better term than "value" here. That's not quite the term I mean. Maybe economists have a suitable term for it.

bane 9y ago

For part of my childhood, my family lived in a fairly remote area right at the start of the Appalachian mountains. The nearest "restaurant" was a gas station 30 minutes away by highway. I've never quite cottoned on to why we moved there, but it seems to have been a combination of my parents desire to buy a home and, not making much money, headed away from the nearest city until the real estate prices became affordable. This combined with a strong sort of (what I'll call) anti-social tendencies on the part of my father (who'd probably describe it more as a desire to be a self-made person with lots of individual freedoms and not having to deal with all the negotiations of living near other people). The people who lived near us seemed to be a mix of people like my parents who just wanted lots of personal space and privacy and were willing to deal with all the time and money wastes that come with that lifestyle, and generational locals who were often very poor (several of my neighbors didn't even have running water in their homes, still had outhouses and often hunted for the majority of their protein and family calories). I personally hated it and ran into the city as I could afford as quickly as I could. But not that I'm getting older I'm also starting to want to remove the hassle of dealing with neighbors and am thinking of looking for a new place to live with more privacy. One difference, I'm much more affluent than my parents and am instead trying to find the lifestyle I want using raw monetary power to live closer in to the local urban centers.

nateberkopec 9y ago

I moved to Taos, New Mexico last year after 8 years in NYC. Taos has about ~5,000 people. I'm a freelance developer and author. It's one of the most beautiful places in America, in my opinion. There's arts, culture, and incredible access to the outdoors. I ski all winter. The internet is actually pretty decent here if you're in the right part of town. Some people have fiber.

true_religion 9y ago

My husband grew up in Pulaski, Virginia which out in the depths of nowhere to most people in Virginia, but got Comcast internet (poorly), Verizon (barely), and 251 acres of land for less than $200,000 dollars. His family moved out there to satisfy his father's dream of being a gentleman farmer. He moved away after university because neither he nor his father are actually very good farmers. I get a bit wistful about it, since it is beautiful countryside and I'd like to live there but the lack of amenities keep me away. Virginia as a whole has lots of empty land, so simply sitting 1.5 hours (during rush hour) outside of DC is enough plop one down in farmland.

aperrien 9y ago

Much of the time, it's because their parents or grandparents live there. Having family connections makes it hard to move away from a place, unless you like risk. Which, of course is how those families got there in the first place...

EliRivers 9y ago
Yes, from some of the answers above it's not so simple as farming and ranching. Sounds like there are many poor people living in what we might consider poverty; I wonder how many would prefer a life working a job and lifestyle in a town or city but simply can't make that move for lack of money, education, connections.