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For many instances - no as you are just removing that long commute. Many places have high priced area's that people commute to from a great distance. In those
by Zenst 7y ago
For many instances - no as you are just removing that long commute. Many places have high priced area's that people commute to from a great distance. In those cases you are removing the commute. For those moving into the countryside, unless your building new houses - your not using up more land. Just shifting and also removing the need for new housing in dense area's, so protecting green spaces were they are more needed.
But any swing one way or another can shift that balance. You can look at the extreme of people all shifting to the countryside that the countryside itself becomes a town, a city.... But things tends to balance out.
After all, in many area's we are seeing the demise of high street shopping, is that a good or bad thing. But I'm sure many do not want to live in stacked up boxes so small as so they are barely affordable and all other activities reduced to door delivery. Though in many area's, that is kinda what people have already.
Then the whole aspect of the population not getting any smaller and such shifts will be more than offset by population expansion.
- fzeroracer 7y agoYou aren't really removing the commute. You're replacing the work commute with the grocery/social life/needs etc commute. Which is also far less efficient on a community-level because those smaller towns and suburbs have to be strongly subsidized in order to maintain infrastructure that far fewer people use. Not to mention that by working remote you're also starving those small towns of business growth opportunities by having it be centralized in another state, which means paying for new infrastructure is much harder especially given how tax-averse Americans tend to be.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoCitation? My small town is not subsidized by anybody, far as I know.
- fzeroracer 7y agoWhere does the funding for new infrastructure come from? Hospitals? Public services such as police or firefighters? Libraries, if your town has any? Or how about schools? This money comes from the federal government, gets distributed down to the state level which then gets distributed out to the various cities and localities depending on need [1]. A lot of these towns are given grants or loans from the USDA in order to fund various improvements [2]. [1] https://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-state-budgets-federal-funding-2015-2018-trump.html https://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-state-budgets-f... [2] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/1/my-journey-from-free-market-ideologue-to-strong-towns-advocate https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/1/my-journey-from...
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoWe build our own in Iowa. Not sure how that works elsewhere. We build our excellent secondary road system (access to every section in Iowa for agricultural purposes). We build our hospitals. Our library was a local bond issue. And our schools! A new bond issue every few years for schools for a growing population. And lets forget the myth that 'federal funding' is free, or come from somewhere else. It comes from us.
- fzeroracer 7y agoFederal funding mostly comes from the states with the highest economic activity. Unless you're disputing that states with higher number of individuals and economic activity doesn't correlate with more taxes paid to the federal government. And on the iowa website itself [1] I can see the grants and federal funding used by the state government. My point being that if the more rural cities were required to pay for everything themselves, they would not be able to. [1] https://iowadot.gov/transit/funding-programs-and-applications/funding-programs https://iowadot.gov/transit/funding-programs-and-application...
- Zenst 7y agoThat can in many parts of the World yield a bit of a chicken and egg combined with the - if you build it - they will come approach. Though in most, it's supply and demand and TAX distribution according to that populous. Even in cities you will see poorer area's subsidies by more affluent area's, though that is not always the case and opens up a whole area of have and divide politics and economics. But it gets down to local experience and equally the country for people, so one perspective can seem complete polar to another's experience.
- Zenst 7y agoI'm aware that at least in the UK and many other countries that the drive for 100% broadband and mobile coverage has seen subsidies to cover rural area's.