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Maybe we shouldn't be trying to keep these small town alive. Maybe we should focus on shutting them down in an orderly fashion and help the residents move to mo

Maybe we shouldn't be trying to keep these small town alive. Maybe we should focus on shutting them down in an orderly fashion and help the residents move to more dynamic areas, probably in large part by helping them acquire skills that are actually in demand there.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thrwthrw93223 8y ago
Easy for you to say as an outsider with a comfortable salaried job. A lot of people in these rural communities aren't educated and live paycheck-to-paycheck. Putting them in larger cities for jobs they aren't qualified and wouldn't be hired for probably isn't the solution.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Putting them in larger cities for jobs they aren't qualified and wouldn't be hired for probably isn't the solution. <tinfoil> If your goal is to make rural people (historically a very hard group for governments to control, everywhere, not just in the US) more dependent on and controllable by the state then it works great. </tinfoil> (Yes, I know I'm just stirring the pot by saying this)
  - krapp 8y ago
    All a man needs is a horse and a gun and he can rule the world, right? I know many rural Americans like to imagine they're still living on the lawless frontier uncorrupted by civilization and Federalism, but.... it's not actually true that they're less dependent on the state than "city folk." Hell, in many cases rural areas are more dependent on the state. And ironically, it's that pastoral, romantic delusion of the statelessness of rural America that leads to the very same populist ideology that makes them easier to control. Like believing a billionaire globalist with a history of exploiting low wage employees and a loose relationship with the truth is an honest, God-fearing hard working friend of the common man.
    - mjsaah 8y ago
      > it's not actually true that they're less dependent on the state than "city folk." Hell, in many cases rural areas are more dependent on the state. I'd like to see you back up this claim, but either way dependence on "the state" isn't really what matters. What matters is the interdependence between the two locales. Cities are almost entirely dependent on rural areas for their food. Rural areas could continue to exist without cities; the reverse is not true. Cities are also more fragile than rural areas. Say something catastrophic were to happen to some region of the US, something that wiped out communications infrastructure, electricity generation, supply routes (roads, rail), etc. The cities in this region would be foodless within a few days. Depending on the city, there would be either no running water or dirty running water. Even if martial law were quickly instituted, violence and starvation would result. Contrast this to the rural areas. Food would certainly be an issue, but it is more likely that the population is either (a) near agricultural infrastructure or (b) prepared to fish/hunt/forage. It helps that there are less mouths to feed. Furthermore, most people are on wells and/or septic tanks, which barring damage gives them a much longer timeline before water/sanitation becomes an issue. Again, it helps that there is a lower density of people needing drinking water and sanitation. I guess my ultimate point is that strategically, it is the rural areas holding the cards. Would they be poorer without the cities? Absolutely. Could they survive? They did for generations.
      - krapp 8y ago
        There are very few rural areas in the US in which most people don't get their food from the supermarket, water from utilities and power from a power company, just like everyone in a city. They didn't build their homes from trees they felled by hand, they don't grow their own food, or sew their own clothes. As far as hunting and fishing goes, few people living in rural areas would be capable of living entirely off the land for an extended period of time, so the premise that they would be able to survive a disaster more or less unscathed while the city dwellers starve is just really not true, at least not as true as Americans would like to believe. One problem rural areas do have is lack of disaster preparedness funds. I live in Texas, and I've seen what happens when disasters hit rural areas. The same people who complain about Washington and city dwellers wind up in tent cities being tended to by the Red Cross and FEMA. See how well agricultural communities do without farm subsidies, housing loans or food stamps. Without the state keeping them alive, a lot of them would simply die out. And this is my ultimate point - most Americans who live in rural areas are little less domesticated than their urban counterparts.
- johan_larson 8y ago
  Indeed. But the skills mismatch is one of the things I am proposing to address. People can be retrained, at least if they're on the younger side. Trying to retrain a 55 year old factory worker whose employer moved the plant to Mexico or China probably wouldn't work too well. It might be better to let him retire early.
bargl 8y ago
This would be great if we also committed to having a reasonable cost of living in major cities by limiting space per family, doing (at the minimum) townhomes only within a 20 mile radius of the city, and working to give everyone affordable and reasonable housing. I think it's probably easier just to promote remote work.
- wcunning 8y ago
  I personally live in a "small" city specifically to have room for more than that, and I'm still unsatisfied with my small-ish free standing house and lot. In a year or two of saving, I'll be moving to the most rural place I can afford and stand to commute from, so your idea wouldn't be acceptable to me in the slightest. What do we do for the people who want something different for themselves? Is their way of life simply no longer going to be allowed?
ryanmarsh 8y ago
Are "we" trying to keep small towns alive? Also, I don't see why remote workers can't live in small towns. They offer a certain quality of life many desire.
- kenmicklas 8y ago
  > They offer a certain quality of life many desire. But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society. It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved. What would some examples of this be, in your opinion?
    - kenmicklas 8y ago
      I think these enormous tracts of suburban and rural land that were populated with government subsidies and no real economic reason to exist should be slowly and gracefully depopulated, with people settling denser areas (which we have a scarcity of, due to racially motivated zoning laws and other policies). We also need to do a better job of limiting sprawl so that people living in cities are closer to nature and don't have to travel through hundreds of miles of suburbs to "escape". People act as if all these small towns are growing our food and are vital for the national economy when in reality the vast majority of them consist simply of the industry required for their local suburban/rural existence (schools, supermarkets, hospitals, road maintenance, etc.). The places that are actually productive (e.g. large agricultural regions) of course have to stay but these are relatively not so populated to begin with (and use less and less labor every year). People have no idea of the magnitude of distortion that props up the myth of the small town in America. Policywise, I think a gradually introduced land value tax and carbon tax (replacing to some degree property and income taxes) could do a lot to enact this restructuring in a "natural" way.
  - 8y ago
jriot 8y ago
I am a data scientist and work remotely, living in a small town on 3.6 acres. Moving to a city would be terrible, living within a 40 minute drive is plenty close enough. Why do you feel the need to shut down entire communities?
- cmorgan31 8y ago
  I don't think it's fair to say this person is shutting down entire communities. Isn't the market doing that? The reality of the article is not every town has a flourishing future in the economy. Although the way it is phrased suggests, they are going to pick you up and walk you out of town even if you disagree. Do we subsidize their lives as some have suggested with UBI? Do we try to revitalize industries that failed? As someone who lives in a small town, what do you think would help those towns and their residents?
  - jriot 8y ago
    In all honesty, the biggest issue particularly in the south (Hawaii as well) is that most people are content with their lives. They aren't trying to move up the corporate ladder, learn the latest tech etc... They are happy with their jobs, culture, families, and traditions. This mindset clashes with the rest of America, particularly the West coast, were having a family, culture, and traditions are seen as negative to society. We are trying to solve regional issues from a national perspective. Local government and issues needs to become more important. Locals need to solve local issue. People in Portland, OR aren't going to to solve issues in Mandeville, LA.
    - cmorgan31 8y ago
      Yes, that's likely the best way to solve it by tackling it locally. I grew up in a rural town in Georgia, and I am all too familiar with the "southern gentleman's pride" which is just a polite way to say my family is stubborn to a fault. I know we will need tradesmen for the foreseeable future so I always try to take that approach instead of the almost cliche "go into tech!" advice. Let's say we could change the narrative, so folks don't depend on the federal level to solve their woes. Would rural America want to change or accept the assistance?
snackbugs 8y ago
How do do you shut down a town in an orderly fashion? More to the point, how do you avoid putting the people you displaced from their homes on a high-rent, low-wage treadmill?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Maybe we should accept that different people want different things and not try to shoehorn everyone into the same situation.
gurumeditations 8y ago
American politicians have no vision anymore, so I think anything like that will never happen. Free public universities in the hundreds will not happen, we must dump $750B into weapons purchases and troop salaries. Guaranteed healthcare wil not happen, $500 bottles of Tylenol won’t allow it. New infrastructure for a bigger population will not happen, the people using the current infrastructure aren’t complaining much. The people who don’t need the help have little incentive to sacrifice their limited resources to help the less advantaged, and the people who do need it don’t know what they need so they get sucked in by destructive authoritarian politicians who focus on the next election instead of the next 20 years. However, the entire reason this is happening is because technology is shifting the economic system to require high-skill concentration into cities and low-skill jobs offloaded to cheap countries rather than needing lots of rural resource-generating towns. It’s easy for me to blame visionless politicians and people, but I think in the end we are all beholden to the system. But what is a system but lots of individual people effecting each other? How did socialism and communism reach their height of popularity in the US in the 1930’s? Can we beat the system by changing it, or is it just too big to ever reach a critical mass of change?
grogenaut 8y ago
This means you are, at a country level, deciding by policy what jobs are desirable. Which seems to mean, according to you, that Farming and agriculture, which are generally distributed due to the land needs, aren't feasible. There are quite a few other industries that are non-tech that are distributed like these. Sure lots of these small towns don't need as MUCH centralization as they have but they still need services because there are still people and things to do out in those places. Now, given modern transportation and things like Amazon, the density in outlying areas may not be as needed. Driving through rural missouri, you see a lot of very tiny dead towns at crossroads, where there used to be a general store, etc, and these died in the 30s. Then you have slightly bigger towns that are dying now. These towns were starting to die in the 90s. In the 60s it took around 8 hours to get from St. Louis to the arkansas border (except along 55). When I was a kid in the 80s it took 4-5 hours. Now it takes 3:30. Because of this you don't need as many of these services as local, but that doesn't mean you don't need them. Also driving through rural missouri you see things you wouldn't expect. My cousin owns a VERY profitable organic chicken ranch about 2 hours outside of St. Louis, near Owensville. Going further south you find all of a sudden where like 80% of the oak for charcoal and wine / burbon barrels come from. It's completely unreasonable for these folks to commute from St. Louis. It's also completely tenable for them to live in a house in the middle of no where and make plenty of money for that life style. What seems to be happening is that much of the rural area is becoming LESS dense as you need only basic services and health care, gas food, etc. There's also other things that need lots of space that you can easily do in rural areas that you can't do other places. If I was to switch to running a textile mill, or a machine shop, and did it in Seattle (where I live now), or St. Louis (where I used to live), I'd have to plunk down 2-5 million on a warehouse. If I did this in Wenatchee area or Owensville, the land is like $200k, and I just build the building and put that other 1-2 million into better tooling and employees, and the effective minimum wage (what people actually need to live), is a lot lower out there because everything is cheaper. Which means product is cheaper.
steauengeglase 8y ago
OK, but first you have to solve for X in the following example: The Romans would displace conquered peoples by resettling them in Rome while the Romans went out into the hinterlands. This allowed the new influx of slaves to become "Romanized" while giving Roman soldiers farm land they were promised to receive as the price of conscription. This creates two massive problems for today's society: Today "Romanizing" has a different name: Cultural Genocide. Whether intentional or not, you are eradicating the cultures you have displaced. Today that's considered a violation of human rights and human dignity. You can't do that and if you try you are at least going to have to find something to mitigate the problem. Do you create an intersectional matrix that finds the most marginalized peoples and leaves them as they are? How do you decide who is most marginalized if you have to move someone. What if their culture a kind of terroir? Can it not exist if you remove it from that place? If so what do you do? Even if they have their language, are the Gullah still the Gullah if you remove them from their diet and usual place of livelihood? Not to mention, when you move their their language will likely disappear and members become assimilated. Then you have the Refugee Resettlement or "Oakie" Problem. You are introducing a new out-group who will compete for resources and power with an existing in-group. This always causes conflict. In theory, if the in-group view the out-group as either dumb and/or untrustworthy, they turn their judgemental views into critical views and their critical views into moral judgements. After all, value judgements never sit still. After a while they begin incarcerating the most marginalized of the out-group and the scapegoating starts. If not carefully calibrated and balanced the in-group start caving heads in with baseball bats, but the more you carefully calibrate it, the more you return back to the "Romanization" problem. There are a lot of other problems that arise, but these are the two most consistent when dealing with humans.
mynameishere 8y ago
Maybe we should ethnically cleanse the area where you live. Maybe that would be good. There's at least one person there who harbors genocidal tendencies, and I for one wouldn't miss him.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thrwthrw93223 8y ago

Easy for you to say as an outsider with a comfortable salaried job. A lot of people in these rural communities aren't educated and live paycheck-to-paycheck. Putting them in larger cities for jobs they aren't qualified and wouldn't be hired for probably isn't the solution.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>Putting them in larger cities for jobs they aren't qualified and wouldn't be hired for probably isn't the solution. <tinfoil> If your goal is to make rural people (historically a very hard group for governments to control, everywhere, not just in the US) more dependent on and controllable by the state then it works great. </tinfoil> (Yes, I know I'm just stirring the pot by saying this)
- krapp 8y ago
  All a man needs is a horse and a gun and he can rule the world, right? I know many rural Americans like to imagine they're still living on the lawless frontier uncorrupted by civilization and Federalism, but.... it's not actually true that they're less dependent on the state than "city folk." Hell, in many cases rural areas are more dependent on the state. And ironically, it's that pastoral, romantic delusion of the statelessness of rural America that leads to the very same populist ideology that makes them easier to control. Like believing a billionaire globalist with a history of exploiting low wage employees and a loose relationship with the truth is an honest, God-fearing hard working friend of the common man.
  - mjsaah 8y ago
    > it's not actually true that they're less dependent on the state than "city folk." Hell, in many cases rural areas are more dependent on the state. I'd like to see you back up this claim, but either way dependence on "the state" isn't really what matters. What matters is the interdependence between the two locales. Cities are almost entirely dependent on rural areas for their food. Rural areas could continue to exist without cities; the reverse is not true. Cities are also more fragile than rural areas. Say something catastrophic were to happen to some region of the US, something that wiped out communications infrastructure, electricity generation, supply routes (roads, rail), etc. The cities in this region would be foodless within a few days. Depending on the city, there would be either no running water or dirty running water. Even if martial law were quickly instituted, violence and starvation would result. Contrast this to the rural areas. Food would certainly be an issue, but it is more likely that the population is either (a) near agricultural infrastructure or (b) prepared to fish/hunt/forage. It helps that there are less mouths to feed. Furthermore, most people are on wells and/or septic tanks, which barring damage gives them a much longer timeline before water/sanitation becomes an issue. Again, it helps that there is a lower density of people needing drinking water and sanitation. I guess my ultimate point is that strategically, it is the rural areas holding the cards. Would they be poorer without the cities? Absolutely. Could they survive? They did for generations.
    - krapp 8y ago
      There are very few rural areas in the US in which most people don't get their food from the supermarket, water from utilities and power from a power company, just like everyone in a city. They didn't build their homes from trees they felled by hand, they don't grow their own food, or sew their own clothes. As far as hunting and fishing goes, few people living in rural areas would be capable of living entirely off the land for an extended period of time, so the premise that they would be able to survive a disaster more or less unscathed while the city dwellers starve is just really not true, at least not as true as Americans would like to believe. One problem rural areas do have is lack of disaster preparedness funds. I live in Texas, and I've seen what happens when disasters hit rural areas. The same people who complain about Washington and city dwellers wind up in tent cities being tended to by the Red Cross and FEMA. See how well agricultural communities do without farm subsidies, housing loans or food stamps. Without the state keeping them alive, a lot of them would simply die out. And this is my ultimate point - most Americans who live in rural areas are little less domesticated than their urban counterparts.
johan_larson 8y ago
Indeed. But the skills mismatch is one of the things I am proposing to address. People can be retrained, at least if they're on the younger side. Trying to retrain a 55 year old factory worker whose employer moved the plant to Mexico or China probably wouldn't work too well. It might be better to let him retire early.

bargl 8y ago

This would be great if we also committed to having a reasonable cost of living in major cities by limiting space per family, doing (at the minimum) townhomes only within a 20 mile radius of the city, and working to give everyone affordable and reasonable housing. I think it's probably easier just to promote remote work.

wcunning 8y ago
I personally live in a "small" city specifically to have room for more than that, and I'm still unsatisfied with my small-ish free standing house and lot. In a year or two of saving, I'll be moving to the most rural place I can afford and stand to commute from, so your idea wouldn't be acceptable to me in the slightest. What do we do for the people who want something different for themselves? Is their way of life simply no longer going to be allowed?

ryanmarsh 8y ago

Are "we" trying to keep small towns alive? Also, I don't see why remote workers can't live in small towns. They offer a certain quality of life many desire.

kenmicklas 8y ago
> They offer a certain quality of life many desire. But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society. It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved. What would some examples of this be, in your opinion?
  - kenmicklas 8y ago
    I think these enormous tracts of suburban and rural land that were populated with government subsidies and no real economic reason to exist should be slowly and gracefully depopulated, with people settling denser areas (which we have a scarcity of, due to racially motivated zoning laws and other policies). We also need to do a better job of limiting sprawl so that people living in cities are closer to nature and don't have to travel through hundreds of miles of suburbs to "escape". People act as if all these small towns are growing our food and are vital for the national economy when in reality the vast majority of them consist simply of the industry required for their local suburban/rural existence (schools, supermarkets, hospitals, road maintenance, etc.). The places that are actually productive (e.g. large agricultural regions) of course have to stay but these are relatively not so populated to begin with (and use less and less labor every year). People have no idea of the magnitude of distortion that props up the myth of the small town in America. Policywise, I think a gradually introduced land value tax and carbon tax (replacing to some degree property and income taxes) could do a lot to enact this restructuring in a "natural" way.
- 8y ago

jriot 8y ago

I am a data scientist and work remotely, living in a small town on 3.6 acres. Moving to a city would be terrible, living within a 40 minute drive is plenty close enough. Why do you feel the need to shut down entire communities?

cmorgan31 8y ago
I don't think it's fair to say this person is shutting down entire communities. Isn't the market doing that? The reality of the article is not every town has a flourishing future in the economy. Although the way it is phrased suggests, they are going to pick you up and walk you out of town even if you disagree. Do we subsidize their lives as some have suggested with UBI? Do we try to revitalize industries that failed? As someone who lives in a small town, what do you think would help those towns and their residents?
- jriot 8y ago
  In all honesty, the biggest issue particularly in the south (Hawaii as well) is that most people are content with their lives. They aren't trying to move up the corporate ladder, learn the latest tech etc... They are happy with their jobs, culture, families, and traditions. This mindset clashes with the rest of America, particularly the West coast, were having a family, culture, and traditions are seen as negative to society. We are trying to solve regional issues from a national perspective. Local government and issues needs to become more important. Locals need to solve local issue. People in Portland, OR aren't going to to solve issues in Mandeville, LA.
  - cmorgan31 8y ago
    Yes, that's likely the best way to solve it by tackling it locally. I grew up in a rural town in Georgia, and I am all too familiar with the "southern gentleman's pride" which is just a polite way to say my family is stubborn to a fault. I know we will need tradesmen for the foreseeable future so I always try to take that approach instead of the almost cliche "go into tech!" advice. Let's say we could change the narrative, so folks don't depend on the federal level to solve their woes. Would rural America want to change or accept the assistance?

snackbugs 8y ago

How do do you shut down a town in an orderly fashion? More to the point, how do you avoid putting the people you displaced from their homes on a high-rent, low-wage treadmill?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago

Maybe we should accept that different people want different things and not try to shoehorn everyone into the same situation.

gurumeditations 8y ago

American politicians have no vision anymore, so I think anything like that will never happen. Free public universities in the hundreds will not happen, we must dump $750B into weapons purchases and troop salaries. Guaranteed healthcare wil not happen, $500 bottles of Tylenol won’t allow it. New infrastructure for a bigger population will not happen, the people using the current infrastructure aren’t complaining much. The people who don’t need the help have little incentive to sacrifice their limited resources to help the less advantaged, and the people who do need it don’t know what they need so they get sucked in by destructive authoritarian politicians who focus on the next election instead of the next 20 years. However, the entire reason this is happening is because technology is shifting the economic system to require high-skill concentration into cities and low-skill jobs offloaded to cheap countries rather than needing lots of rural resource-generating towns. It’s easy for me to blame visionless politicians and people, but I think in the end we are all beholden to the system. But what is a system but lots of individual people effecting each other? How did socialism and communism reach their height of popularity in the US in the 1930’s? Can we beat the system by changing it, or is it just too big to ever reach a critical mass of change?

grogenaut 8y ago

This means you are, at a country level, deciding by policy what jobs are desirable. Which seems to mean, according to you, that Farming and agriculture, which are generally distributed due to the land needs, aren't feasible. There are quite a few other industries that are non-tech that are distributed like these. Sure lots of these small towns don't need as MUCH centralization as they have but they still need services because there are still people and things to do out in those places. Now, given modern transportation and things like Amazon, the density in outlying areas may not be as needed. Driving through rural missouri, you see a lot of very tiny dead towns at crossroads, where there used to be a general store, etc, and these died in the 30s. Then you have slightly bigger towns that are dying now. These towns were starting to die in the 90s. In the 60s it took around 8 hours to get from St. Louis to the arkansas border (except along 55). When I was a kid in the 80s it took 4-5 hours. Now it takes 3:30. Because of this you don't need as many of these services as local, but that doesn't mean you don't need them. Also driving through rural missouri you see things you wouldn't expect. My cousin owns a VERY profitable organic chicken ranch about 2 hours outside of St. Louis, near Owensville. Going further south you find all of a sudden where like 80% of the oak for charcoal and wine / burbon barrels come from. It's completely unreasonable for these folks to commute from St. Louis. It's also completely tenable for them to live in a house in the middle of no where and make plenty of money for that life style. What seems to be happening is that much of the rural area is becoming LESS dense as you need only basic services and health care, gas food, etc. There's also other things that need lots of space that you can easily do in rural areas that you can't do other places. If I was to switch to running a textile mill, or a machine shop, and did it in Seattle (where I live now), or St. Louis (where I used to live), I'd have to plunk down 2-5 million on a warehouse. If I did this in Wenatchee area or Owensville, the land is like $200k, and I just build the building and put that other 1-2 million into better tooling and employees, and the effective minimum wage (what people actually need to live), is a lot lower out there because everything is cheaper. Which means product is cheaper.

steauengeglase 8y ago

OK, but first you have to solve for X in the following example: The Romans would displace conquered peoples by resettling them in Rome while the Romans went out into the hinterlands. This allowed the new influx of slaves to become "Romanized" while giving Roman soldiers farm land they were promised to receive as the price of conscription. This creates two massive problems for today's society: Today "Romanizing" has a different name: Cultural Genocide. Whether intentional or not, you are eradicating the cultures you have displaced. Today that's considered a violation of human rights and human dignity. You can't do that and if you try you are at least going to have to find something to mitigate the problem. Do you create an intersectional matrix that finds the most marginalized peoples and leaves them as they are? How do you decide who is most marginalized if you have to move someone. What if their culture a kind of terroir? Can it not exist if you remove it from that place? If so what do you do? Even if they have their language, are the Gullah still the Gullah if you remove them from their diet and usual place of livelihood? Not to mention, when you move their their language will likely disappear and members become assimilated. Then you have the Refugee Resettlement or "Oakie" Problem. You are introducing a new out-group who will compete for resources and power with an existing in-group. This always causes conflict. In theory, if the in-group view the out-group as either dumb and/or untrustworthy, they turn their judgemental views into critical views and their critical views into moral judgements. After all, value judgements never sit still. After a while they begin incarcerating the most marginalized of the out-group and the scapegoating starts. If not carefully calibrated and balanced the in-group start caving heads in with baseball bats, but the more you carefully calibrate it, the more you return back to the "Romanization" problem. There are a lot of other problems that arise, but these are the two most consistent when dealing with humans.

mynameishere 8y ago

Maybe we should ethnically cleanse the area where you live. Maybe that would be good. There's at least one person there who harbors genocidal tendencies, and I for one wouldn't miss him.