> What is important, to me, is that it's a society that's flatter and more egalitarian than anything I've observed on the coasts. Fair enough, but that really

> What is important, to me, is that it's a society that's flatter and more egalitarian than anything I've observed on the coasts. Fair enough, but that really doesn’t jive with my experience. I graduated from a class of 300 people in a farming community and many of my classmates I know have left because of an inability to find decent paying or meaningful work. The nearest large town of about 100,000 people is in the middle of a housing crisis and has to grapple with all the same issues that large coastal cities have been dealing with for a decade. And they’re certainly not egalitarian about any of the solutions. Large, national real estate companies have moved in, developing primarily luxury stock, but also buying up existing housing and apartments to make sure prices and rents stay high. There’s all kinds of eliminationist rhetoric about the poor and homeless being tossed around (which honestly was always the case, even when I was a kid). Local politics are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy families. They’re archly right-wing, which is different from the coast, but not really too much in terms of how much the poor are cared for. I looked up the stats for Texas and they seemed pretty bad on inequality, healthcare, etc. > You aren't defined by your job and there are institutions that draw broad swaths of society into shared experience. (Often, because there is no alternative--in small town Iowa, the surgeon's kid goes to the same high school as the farm worker's kid because that's the only high school.) Again, I really want to emphasize that just because it doesn’t seem as apparent to you doesn’t mean it’s there. In my very small school, the class distinctions were very sharp, even if we weren’t as easily segregated. That happened too, but mostly in the form of kids being sent off to expensive religious schools for middle and high school. Wealthy kids bullied and mocked kids from families who were service workers. Everyone knew who lived in the trailer parks versus the subdivisions. Poorer, working farmers were mocked by those who had wealthy hobby farms (and often took care of animals like horses for the rich kids). It’s definitely a different tapestry of cruelty from city life, but it shouldn’t be romanticized or misunderstood in anyway. > If you need permission from the government to build anything, and permission is granted based on a central zoning plan Right, but there’s not a central zoning plan as far as I’m aware, there are many competing corrupt ones who seemingly stifle all but the most unaffordable development. A state-level, less restrictive, centralized zoning plan would probably actually be an improvement.