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We've come a long way since Jefferson, Adams, and Madison opined that cities were "the natural enemies of virtue and happiness." While I don't want to go back t

We've come a long way since Jefferson, Adams, and Madison opined that cities were "the natural enemies of virtue and happiness." While I don't want to go back to a world where more than 50% of the population is solely bound to food production, I do feel like we're losing something. The real tension in the US, rural vs urban (not red vs blue), just continues to grow worse. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that robust systems usually avoid centralization, favoring variety and redundancy instead.

spamizbad 3y ago
Rural living gets constantly gassed up as this incredibly serene, peaceful place to live and yet even in the age of remote work people aren’t budging. About as close as Americans get are exurban enclaves, with their major selling point being cost-effective new construction (thanks in part to more mature city’s draconian zoning policies) People have voted with their feet and the feet have voted for cities.
- travisgriggs 3y ago
  For me personally, it is not some "nature vs dirty streets" argument at all. When I read the writings of the mentioned, it's not all "ag is beautiful." They had specific experience with how power became centralized in European cities which led to governance and societies which were short term/locally optimized to the detriment of all.
  - ZoomerCretin 3y ago
    And yet, this is exactly what is happening now. Despite being given disproportionate political power (the Senate), the closure of rural hospitals has not stopped or slowed. Politicians are not farmers, they're not rural laborers, they're overwhelmingly lawyers and white collar workers who spend their times in cities, or at best, rich enclaves within the district they represent. Politicians are not selected today like they were when the founders lived. In rural districts, when given the choice between A. A carpetbagger endorsed by the most recent Republican president who talks about wedge issues whose outcome has almost no impact on daily life B. A local star who promises to make his votes cost his party a lot of pork (money for projects in his district, like keeping hospitals open), and represent his district's very specific economic interests most districts are voting for candidate A in the primary.
    - hattmall 3y ago
      I think it's just a natural realignment. Urgent cares take a lot of the hospitals action. Pretty much everyone can afford a decent car and knows that the better hospital isn't the rural one. Expanding ambulance and air evac is a big thing right now. Even in urban and suburban settings you are still dealing with fair travel times to hospitals. If you can get decent ambulance, air ambulance, and urgent care there's really not as much of a need for rural hospitals.
      - ROTMetro 3y ago
        And the airlift company sells me a coverage plan for $120 a year (which also covers skiing accidents), while there is nothing I can do to reduce an ambulance rides price that will be in the thousands.
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  Please, people have been forced into cities. WFH isn’t near as common in other industries and even for most tech workers it has been temporary. The rural county I live in saw an influx of people moving very far from the city, only to be forced to leave again because of RTO. We had a huge population boom, only for it to be ripped away by shortsighted managers who don’t care about what their workers want.
  - vkou 3y ago
    People have been forced into cities by the cold hard reality of the physical world. That reality is that it's dramatically cheaper to provide services to people that are living close to eachother. Unless we get to a post-scarcity utopia, or someone repeals the law of economics, city services will continue to be, as a rule, better and, in relative terms, cheaper than rural ones.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I have very secure WFH and I moved in closer intentionally. It's been life changing, I got rid of my car, moved in to a high end inner city apartment, and fully embraced the lifestyle. The access to social experiences in the city is unmatched. I get access to all this stuff like a pool and gym that I couldn't or wouldn't pay for if I had to maintain it myself. Living inner city kind of makes you a social hub where everyone wants to come to your place because it's super accessible by public transport so everyone can drink and hang out in the spa/steamroom/sauna and then walk out to the local pubs and restaurants. Meanwhile I see all my rural family stagnating, getting addicted to drugs, stuck on welfare, and living subjectively depressing lifestyles.
    - BizarreByte 3y ago
      > I have very secure WFH and I moved in closer intentionally. It's been life changing, I got rid of my car, moved in to a high end inner city apartment, and fully embraced the lifestyle. Honestly? I did too and I'm am absolutely not sold on this lifestyle at all. I told myself I wanted to try it and see what it was like for a year and I have never been more lonely before in my entire life. Unless something changes I will move back after my lease is up, because a boring life is better than a lonely life. There are more social events, but IMO they're very surface level, people don't want any deeper connection. > Meanwhile I see all my rural family stagnating, getting addicted to drugs, stuck on welfare, and living subjectively depressing lifestyles. I mean you're making pretty harsh judgments about their lives. If someone lives rural and is happy, that should be good enough even if you don't want the same lifestyle. Getting addicted to drugs? I walk past junkies literally all the time now in the city, rural areas don't have a monopoly on drug issues.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  I'd argue that remote work hasn't normalized for long enough yet for this conclusion to be reached. Also, it doesn't account for the 3.6 million Boomers who retire every year, begin collecting Social Security, and who can then move to rural areas with their income not tied to a physical wage earning location.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Rural areas are nice until you want or need something other than isolation and nature. Healthcare, decent schools, used to be a problem to get fast internet, restaurants, bookstores, extracurriculars for your kids, etc.
- pnpnp 3y ago
  I think local effects are still at play. I know many rural places that are still shrinking, but my town has nearly doubled in size and shows no signs of slowing. We’re over 2 hours from the nearest airport (on a highway), so pretty “out there.”
  - spamizbad 3y ago
    For 2020 the Census Bureau redefined what qualifies as “urban” living (population thresholds were doubled). Despite this, the share that live in rural areas only increased 0.7 points (19.3 -> 20.0). Using the previous metrics, rural populations shrank relative to urban. Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... https://carsey.unh.edu/publication-rural-america-lost-population-over-past-decade-for-first-time-in-history#:~:text=Between%202010%20and%202020%2C%20the%20rural%20population%20declined%20by%20289%2C000,of%20221%2C000%20(0.5%20percent) https://carsey.unh.edu/publication-rural-america-lost-popula....
    - pnpnp 3y ago
      I think there’s also a shift in which rural areas people are living in. For example, not as many people are needed to farm, but many rural areas are attractive to new remote workers. The areas don’t necessarily overlap. My hometown farm community has shrank dramatically, but my new rural community has been extremely successful at attracting white collar workers.
- staplers 3y ago
  Using a very small window of 3 years in a society built around the automobile as anecdotal evidence isn't as concrete evidence as you might believe. Macro-trends always contain variance which can infer an opposite micro-trend. The housing supply is infamously constrained right now. Many counties have a cap on density which simply don't allow people to pick up and move on a whim to rural areas. Big migrations take a long time.
- jmoak3 3y ago
  To add to your comment - no man is an island and we live in a world of scarcity. Living on twenty acres sounds great until you realize you'd like TVs, internet, toilet paper, a car, and education for your kids. Turns out those things cost money because there's only so much of them - how are you gonna make an income living in the middle of nowhere to pay people to send it all your way? What can you do for them? Who do you know? If you're lucky you can provide agricultural products, but likely not at a competitive scale - so you'll hemorrhage money season after season. All of those people you see on instagram selling cabbages? They're not selling the cabbages, they're selling the instagram. Your network will be reduced to a bunch of other people in the same boat. Your life will likely enter a downward spiral into irrelevance. You either bring all of the money you'll ever need, or find a way to decouple from society as much as possible because you'll likely have little to offer it. Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot. Piling into cities (and suburbs) is just common sense. It's where the jobs are. EDIT: some wording, two -> twenty (oops lol)
  - hirundo 3y ago
    "Living on twenty acres sounds great until you realize you'd like TVs, internet, toilet paper, a car, and education for your kids. Turns out those things cost money because there's only so much of them - how are you gonna make an income living in the middle of nowhere to pay people to send it all your way?" With a remote tech job, like I've been doing for over a decade while living on a rural four acre lot. I started with crappy satellite internet and now have decent satellite internet. And also toilet paper, etc. I love it out here and can hardly imagine wanting to live in a city anymore.
    - jmoak3 3y ago
      >Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot. I also moved out of the major metros - some things are worth the risk :)
  - civilitty 3y ago
- baremetal 3y ago
  >Rural living gets constantly gassed up as this incredibly serene, peaceful place to live It is indeed peaceful. It is just a lot of physical work and being in the sun. At least half the year or so. Lots of people are leaving the cities. Many of the major cities in the US fit the definition of a failed state. Including SF. "A failed state is a state that has lost its effective ability to govern its populace. A failed state maintains legal sovereignty but experiences a breakdown in political power, law enforcement, and civil society, leading to a state of near-anarchy." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state
  - vkou 3y ago
    > Lots of people are leaving the cities. And most of them aren't moving to Flyover, Nowhere. They are moving 8 miles down Main Street, to another part of their metro area. > definition of a failed state You have a very strange definition of a failed state. Are there rival warlords conscripting people into their liberation armies at gunpoint? Is drinking the tap water going to kill you? Does SF have to make do with 8 to 18 hours of electricity a day? Is there no food at the grocery? Are the schools and universities open? Are there multiple acts of terrorism a week, caused by plain-clothes insurgents? Has unemployment hit 30%? Have employers stopped paying people? Are pensioners lining up on Market Street every day, to try to sell strangers their fur coats and toasters and jewelry, so they can afford to feed themselves next week? Has life expectancy dropped by a decade or so?
    - baremetal 3y ago
      >Are there multiple acts of terrorism a week, caused by plain-clothes insurgents? Gang shootings every day? >Are pensioners lining up on Market Street every day, to try to sell strangers their fur coats and toasters and jewelry No the pensioners couldn't afford to live there and moved out. You have immigrant people selling [stolen] toasters and shampoo on the street. >Has life expectancy dropped by a decade or so? Life expectancy is significantly shorter for a large segment of the population via overdose, because lawlessness pervades. > Are the schools and universities open? Yes I believe SF has reopened schools again, finally. You have masses of people living on the street in tents. And rampant open air drug use and sale. Lawlessness. I suggest you re-evaluate what you are willing to tolerate.
- manicennui 3y ago
  It's possible that people have moved to cities for jobs more than anything. I spent over a decade living in Chicago, and it grows tiresome. Now that remote work is prevalent in our profession, I'll never live in a city again. Access to high quality medical services is a concern though.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > It's possible that people have moved to cities for jobs more than anything It's not just possible, that's exactly why. The vast majority of people live in cities because of economics, not because they inherently prefer cities.
- jojobas 3y ago
  People voted for junk food and facebook, doesn't mean obesity and depression is good for them.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Just anecdotally I have observed that people who live inner city tend to have much lower rates of obesity and sedentary lifestyles.
- anikom15 3y ago
  Most people don’t move that far from where they grow up. City populations have more to do with a select few choosing where they want to live and either having lots of babies, or convincing other people to come to them. Once the city is established, most of its population growth is self-sustaining.
- TexanFeller 3y ago
  > Rural living gets constantly gassed up as this incredibly serene, peaceful place to live and yet even in the age of remote work people aren’t budging. One big reason is that remote work was never guaranteed to last. It's starting to crumble now with big tech requiring RTO x days a week or factoring in physical presence into performance reviews. People that aren't already independently wealthy couldn't risk buying a house in the country. In my rural home town your options for work if you lost your tech job(easier because crappy internet options) would be hard labor on a farm or dairy or maybe work at the grocery or fast food joint - nothing else.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  Anecdotal counterpoint, since the beginning of the pandemic response my wife and I moved onto a farm with a few dozen acres and are slowly building it up to a homestead. A catw majority of people stayed in cities, or are moving back, but some did vote with their feet and left for the country. It's important to not that it might be easy to#if hear from those that started in cities, anyone that moved more rural may be out of your field of view and seemingly not exist.
- bequanna 3y ago
  First of all, what do you mean by "Rural living"? Living in a town of 20k people? 10k? 500? Or on an acreage/cabin a half mile from neighbors? All of these are pretty distinct experiences. Let's just say any town <20k people is considered rural. From what I've seen, it is almost unheard of for someone who was not raised in a rural area to successfully live long term in an area like this. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of seeing retirees leave the city and try to live full time in a remote cabin on a recreational lake. None of them lasted more than a couple years. A surprising number of divorces. Growing up in a small town I have plenty of similar stories of families moving in from a larger city and leaving shortly after. I'm not exactly sure how to explain this but generally I think the challenges of rural living (weather, social, economic, isolation, etc.) are very difficult if someone isn't familiar. As you mention, people see the benefits (incredibly serene, peaceful place, etc) but I think many aren't expecting or prepared for the challenges.
stinkytaco 3y ago
I also don't know the solution, but I'm reasonably sure closing essential services like hospitals is not part of it. Unfortunately, the kind of policies that might keep those places open get soundly rejected by people who live in those communities, or at least by the people who represent them. I grew up in a rural community and am sometimes wistful for it, but I don't want to move far away from medical care, internet, reliable power, and other basic services and all of those have only gotten worse where I grew up.
USB5 3y ago
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nobody9999 3y ago
>We've come a long way since Jefferson, Adams, and Madison opined that cities were "the natural enemies of virtue and happiness." While I don't want to go back to a world where more than 50% of the population is solely bound to food production, I do feel like we're losing something. The real tension in the US, rural vs urban (not red vs blue), just continues to grow worse. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that robust systems usually avoid centralization, favoring variety and redundancy instead. One of the big issues (at least AFAICT) is the lack of good paying jobs in reasonable proximity to rural areas. Why is that? Among other things, one issue seems to be a lack of specific kinds of infrastructure in rural areas: High-speed rail and high-speed internet connectivity. High-speed rail with hubs in urban (or urban-adjacent) areas can provide reasonable access for folks to commute to where the jobs are. High-speed internet connectivity would allow for (some) businesses to start and thrive in rural areas. Improving such infrastructure in rural areas would encourage (at least for a while), urban/suburban dwellers to move to more rural areas without compromising their earnings ability. And if such a migration is made possible/desirable, other businesses supporting those new residents (apartment buildings, bars/restaurants, cultural activities and a raft of other opportunities will present themselves for other, local, businesses. Would moving stuff like this be easy? No. There are a whole bunch of issues that block creating such infrastructure and the business environment that would depend upon such infrastructure. That said, urban/suburban folks moving to a functional (in terms of access and services) rural areas will increase the incentives for other businesses (hospitals, anyone?) to come to, remain and/or expand in rural areas. This would reduce some of the pressure on housing prices in urban/suburban areas and revitalize the economies of rural areas. I don't expect to see such movement in the near to medium term, and more's the pity. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't advocate for such things. Edit: Fixed typo.
- prottog 3y ago
  > High-speed rail with hubs in urban (or urban-adjacent) areas can provide reasonable access for folks to commute to where the jobs are. You don't need HSR for this. Actually, high-speed rail and commuting are mutually exclusive, because commuter rail lines stop way too often to reach even rural two-lane highway speeds. The TGV is very nice and will get you from Reims to La Defense, about a hundred miles of commute, in an hour and a half (via Paris l'Est), but only because Reims happens to be on the TGV trunk line and has a stop. If you're coming in from Vaires-sur-Marne, which that same TGV line goes through but doesn't stop at? About an hour to La Defense on the commuter RER despite covering less than a third of the distance.
hayst4ck 3y ago
The tension is not rural vs urban. It is educated vs the uneducated. It is urban vs rural because rural folks are less educated and therefore more susceptible to forces that are predatory to those who do not make a practice of critical thinking, such as fox news (or worse). I don't think it's controversial to say that education liberalizes. Here's Nate Silver talking about education as a predictor of the 2016 election: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pr... > In short, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. Here is Pew weighing in: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideo...
- mbg721 3y ago
  The people you're upset about mostly aren't rural, they're outer-suburban and they aren't buying the values that you're selling.
  - hayst4ck 3y ago
    The tragedy of the commons is a tragedy because it requires the fishermen who would otherwise fish the sea empty to not fish as much as they could. Why would any individual fisherman be happy with quotas? So I won't deny that they don't want (some of) those values, but that is why education is important, to see that if you aren't willing to make sacrifices (to say fight global warming) then you will be forced into even worse situations.
- prottog 3y ago
  > rural folks are less educated and therefore more susceptible to forces that are predatory to those who do not make a practice of critical thinking > I don't think it's controversial to say that education liberalizes Highly-educated city folks make totally preposterous claims with zero critical thinking all the time. So you're right that education tends to liberalize, but wrong that education somehow makes people engage in more critical thinking. I posit that for every piece of garbage that comes out of Fox News, there's an equal and opposite piece of garbage coming out of MSNBC.
woodruffw 3y ago
Putting aside the rest of the comment: I don't know how living away from where all of the redundant infrastructure in any given country is can be considered "robust" in any meaningful sense.
msla 3y ago
Some hallmarks of rural living as I have known it: - Mom-and-pop restaurants that are just Sysco retail outlets. - Three screen movie theaters that only play the absolute most popular films. - Underfunded schools. - After-school activities that amounted to drinking, driving, drugs, or all three. - Empty main streets. - No local theater, bands, or culture in general. - Absolutely no transit options beyond driving yourself or walking, and walking on rural roads is dangerous.
- rektide 3y ago
  I hope we see ebikes become a valid option in more places. There's alas many places where there's poor/no shoulder or it's just otherwise be way to unsafe. But it's soo nice having such an unencumbered light way to get around.
  - msla 3y ago
    Ebikes would help, but I honestly don't think anything of that sort other than electric cars and trucks will get much uptake. As you said, there's often no shoulder, and, due to low population density, there's little upkeep done on roads, especially in the winter and after storms. In short, unless your vehicle can handle snow, ice, and animals, it isn't a complete solution, not to mention the cargo capacity needed to not have to go shopping every day when the grocery store is miles away.
Terr_ 3y ago
> We've come a long way since Jefferson, Adams, and Madison opined that cities were "the natural enemies of virtue and happiness." A casual search for that quote shows no results, is it a paraphrasing of something? Either way, some skepticism is needed when one considers the source: Wealthy landowners that didn't need a city near them in order to command conveniences and comforts in their mansions, estates, and/or plantations.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Jefferson, Adams and Madison took one side of a long debate. I'm sure there were founding fathers with different views. Maybe Franklin: https://www.city-journal.org/article/benjamin-franklin-city-slicker https://www.city-journal.org/article/benjamin-franklin-city-...
nine_k 3y ago
The US have a large number of large and important cities, so it's not that centralized. It's not like the UK / London thing. Redundancy and resilience have n associated cost. Not everybody is keen to pay this cost, especially when the benefits do not seem large. As every complex thing, it's a matter of balance.
Balgair 3y ago
> The real tension in the US, rural vs urban (not red vs blue) As usual, it depends. For example, out west the tension is with water rights. All other political issues are like molehills to the mountain that is water. To be clear, the western US states aren't running out of water, they are running out of cheap water. Usually, this pit the mountains against the farmers/ranchers, but it affects the whole population of a state in changing and varied ways. Divides are formed and forgotten every 20 years or so. So, no, the real tensions aren't in the US's population centering methods, it's in dozens of different ways at dozens of different times and places. Thinking that ~350M people can be divided in any black-white manner for any length of time is a failure of imagination.
- bumby 3y ago
  Devils advocate: isn't this just the same rural/urban divide illustrated through a different lens? It could be similarly portrayed as rural agriculture water rights vs. city dwellers water rights. Both want cheap water. Both point to the unsustainable practices of the other regarding water usage.
  - Balgair 3y ago
    Sometimes yes, often no. In CA, there is a huge North-South divide when it comes to water. Northern CA constantly complains about LA 'stealing' all the water. In this case, it's urban vs urban. In CO, it's rural mountain areas where the water comes from versus the rural plains ranchers where the water is needed. Frontrange cities mostly have their own water rights figured out, mostly. In UT, it's just a hell of a mess and everyone is angry at everyone else and the Great Salt Lake becomes ever more that little brine pond over there. Then you add in all the compacts along the Colorado and everyone just has more to fight about. I guess you can sorta squint and say it's urban v. rural in some cases. And that would only be due to the square mileage per capita in the definitions. But, it's so much more than that and so much more complicated and legalistic and messy. The only common thread in the western US is water and how there just isn't enough of it for cheap.
    - bumby 3y ago
nitwit005 3y ago
Living with the land, in a traditional manner, I can see making some people happy. Industrial agriculture and mining, I cannot. Don't romanticize dangerous jobs working for some corporation.

spamizbad 3y ago

Rural living gets constantly gassed up as this incredibly serene, peaceful place to live and yet even in the age of remote work people aren’t budging. About as close as Americans get are exurban enclaves, with their major selling point being cost-effective new construction (thanks in part to more mature city’s draconian zoning policies) People have voted with their feet and the feet have voted for cities.

travisgriggs 3y ago
For me personally, it is not some "nature vs dirty streets" argument at all. When I read the writings of the mentioned, it's not all "ag is beautiful." They had specific experience with how power became centralized in European cities which led to governance and societies which were short term/locally optimized to the detriment of all.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  And yet, this is exactly what is happening now. Despite being given disproportionate political power (the Senate), the closure of rural hospitals has not stopped or slowed. Politicians are not farmers, they're not rural laborers, they're overwhelmingly lawyers and white collar workers who spend their times in cities, or at best, rich enclaves within the district they represent. Politicians are not selected today like they were when the founders lived. In rural districts, when given the choice between A. A carpetbagger endorsed by the most recent Republican president who talks about wedge issues whose outcome has almost no impact on daily life B. A local star who promises to make his votes cost his party a lot of pork (money for projects in his district, like keeping hospitals open), and represent his district's very specific economic interests most districts are voting for candidate A in the primary.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    I think it's just a natural realignment. Urgent cares take a lot of the hospitals action. Pretty much everyone can afford a decent car and knows that the better hospital isn't the rural one. Expanding ambulance and air evac is a big thing right now. Even in urban and suburban settings you are still dealing with fair travel times to hospitals. If you can get decent ambulance, air ambulance, and urgent care there's really not as much of a need for rural hospitals.
    - ROTMetro 3y ago
      And the airlift company sells me a coverage plan for $120 a year (which also covers skiing accidents), while there is nothing I can do to reduce an ambulance rides price that will be in the thousands.
BizarreByte 3y ago
Please, people have been forced into cities. WFH isn’t near as common in other industries and even for most tech workers it has been temporary. The rural county I live in saw an influx of people moving very far from the city, only to be forced to leave again because of RTO. We had a huge population boom, only for it to be ripped away by shortsighted managers who don’t care about what their workers want.
- vkou 3y ago
  People have been forced into cities by the cold hard reality of the physical world. That reality is that it's dramatically cheaper to provide services to people that are living close to eachother. Unless we get to a post-scarcity utopia, or someone repeals the law of economics, city services will continue to be, as a rule, better and, in relative terms, cheaper than rural ones.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I have very secure WFH and I moved in closer intentionally. It's been life changing, I got rid of my car, moved in to a high end inner city apartment, and fully embraced the lifestyle. The access to social experiences in the city is unmatched. I get access to all this stuff like a pool and gym that I couldn't or wouldn't pay for if I had to maintain it myself. Living inner city kind of makes you a social hub where everyone wants to come to your place because it's super accessible by public transport so everyone can drink and hang out in the spa/steamroom/sauna and then walk out to the local pubs and restaurants. Meanwhile I see all my rural family stagnating, getting addicted to drugs, stuck on welfare, and living subjectively depressing lifestyles.
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    > I have very secure WFH and I moved in closer intentionally. It's been life changing, I got rid of my car, moved in to a high end inner city apartment, and fully embraced the lifestyle. Honestly? I did too and I'm am absolutely not sold on this lifestyle at all. I told myself I wanted to try it and see what it was like for a year and I have never been more lonely before in my entire life. Unless something changes I will move back after my lease is up, because a boring life is better than a lonely life. There are more social events, but IMO they're very surface level, people don't want any deeper connection. > Meanwhile I see all my rural family stagnating, getting addicted to drugs, stuck on welfare, and living subjectively depressing lifestyles. I mean you're making pretty harsh judgments about their lives. If someone lives rural and is happy, that should be good enough even if you don't want the same lifestyle. Getting addicted to drugs? I walk past junkies literally all the time now in the city, rural areas don't have a monopoly on drug issues.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
I'd argue that remote work hasn't normalized for long enough yet for this conclusion to be reached. Also, it doesn't account for the 3.6 million Boomers who retire every year, begin collecting Social Security, and who can then move to rural areas with their income not tied to a physical wage earning location.
MattGaiser 3y ago
Rural areas are nice until you want or need something other than isolation and nature. Healthcare, decent schools, used to be a problem to get fast internet, restaurants, bookstores, extracurriculars for your kids, etc.
pnpnp 3y ago
I think local effects are still at play. I know many rural places that are still shrinking, but my town has nearly doubled in size and shows no signs of slowing. We’re over 2 hours from the nearest airport (on a highway), so pretty “out there.”
- spamizbad 3y ago
  For 2020 the Census Bureau redefined what qualifies as “urban” living (population thresholds were doubled). Despite this, the share that live in rural areas only increased 0.7 points (19.3 -> 20.0). Using the previous metrics, rural populations shrank relative to urban. Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru... https://carsey.unh.edu/publication-rural-america-lost-population-over-past-decade-for-first-time-in-history#:~:text=Between%202010%20and%202020%2C%20the%20rural%20population%20declined%20by%20289%2C000,of%20221%2C000%20(0.5%20percent) https://carsey.unh.edu/publication-rural-america-lost-popula....
  - pnpnp 3y ago
    I think there’s also a shift in which rural areas people are living in. For example, not as many people are needed to farm, but many rural areas are attractive to new remote workers. The areas don’t necessarily overlap. My hometown farm community has shrank dramatically, but my new rural community has been extremely successful at attracting white collar workers.
staplers 3y ago
Using a very small window of 3 years in a society built around the automobile as anecdotal evidence isn't as concrete evidence as you might believe. Macro-trends always contain variance which can infer an opposite micro-trend. The housing supply is infamously constrained right now. Many counties have a cap on density which simply don't allow people to pick up and move on a whim to rural areas. Big migrations take a long time.
jmoak3 3y ago
To add to your comment - no man is an island and we live in a world of scarcity. Living on twenty acres sounds great until you realize you'd like TVs, internet, toilet paper, a car, and education for your kids. Turns out those things cost money because there's only so much of them - how are you gonna make an income living in the middle of nowhere to pay people to send it all your way? What can you do for them? Who do you know? If you're lucky you can provide agricultural products, but likely not at a competitive scale - so you'll hemorrhage money season after season. All of those people you see on instagram selling cabbages? They're not selling the cabbages, they're selling the instagram. Your network will be reduced to a bunch of other people in the same boat. Your life will likely enter a downward spiral into irrelevance. You either bring all of the money you'll ever need, or find a way to decouple from society as much as possible because you'll likely have little to offer it. Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot. Piling into cities (and suburbs) is just common sense. It's where the jobs are. EDIT: some wording, two -> twenty (oops lol)
- hirundo 3y ago
  "Living on twenty acres sounds great until you realize you'd like TVs, internet, toilet paper, a car, and education for your kids. Turns out those things cost money because there's only so much of them - how are you gonna make an income living in the middle of nowhere to pay people to send it all your way?" With a remote tech job, like I've been doing for over a decade while living on a rural four acre lot. I started with crappy satellite internet and now have decent satellite internet. And also toilet paper, etc. I love it out here and can hardly imagine wanting to live in a city anymore.
  - jmoak3 3y ago
    >Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot. I also moved out of the major metros - some things are worth the risk :)
- civilitty 3y ago
baremetal 3y ago
>Rural living gets constantly gassed up as this incredibly serene, peaceful place to live It is indeed peaceful. It is just a lot of physical work and being in the sun. At least half the year or so. Lots of people are leaving the cities. Many of the major cities in the US fit the definition of a failed state. Including SF. "A failed state is a state that has lost its effective ability to govern its populace. A failed state maintains legal sovereignty but experiences a breakdown in political power, law enforcement, and civil society, leading to a state of near-anarchy." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state
- vkou 3y ago
  > Lots of people are leaving the cities. And most of them aren't moving to Flyover, Nowhere. They are moving 8 miles down Main Street, to another part of their metro area. > definition of a failed state You have a very strange definition of a failed state. Are there rival warlords conscripting people into their liberation armies at gunpoint? Is drinking the tap water going to kill you? Does SF have to make do with 8 to 18 hours of electricity a day? Is there no food at the grocery? Are the schools and universities open? Are there multiple acts of terrorism a week, caused by plain-clothes insurgents? Has unemployment hit 30%? Have employers stopped paying people? Are pensioners lining up on Market Street every day, to try to sell strangers their fur coats and toasters and jewelry, so they can afford to feed themselves next week? Has life expectancy dropped by a decade or so?
  - baremetal 3y ago
    >Are there multiple acts of terrorism a week, caused by plain-clothes insurgents? Gang shootings every day? >Are pensioners lining up on Market Street every day, to try to sell strangers their fur coats and toasters and jewelry No the pensioners couldn't afford to live there and moved out. You have immigrant people selling [stolen] toasters and shampoo on the street. >Has life expectancy dropped by a decade or so? Life expectancy is significantly shorter for a large segment of the population via overdose, because lawlessness pervades. > Are the schools and universities open? Yes I believe SF has reopened schools again, finally. You have masses of people living on the street in tents. And rampant open air drug use and sale. Lawlessness. I suggest you re-evaluate what you are willing to tolerate.
manicennui 3y ago
It's possible that people have moved to cities for jobs more than anything. I spent over a decade living in Chicago, and it grows tiresome. Now that remote work is prevalent in our profession, I'll never live in a city again. Access to high quality medical services is a concern though.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > It's possible that people have moved to cities for jobs more than anything It's not just possible, that's exactly why. The vast majority of people live in cities because of economics, not because they inherently prefer cities.
jojobas 3y ago
People voted for junk food and facebook, doesn't mean obesity and depression is good for them.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Just anecdotally I have observed that people who live inner city tend to have much lower rates of obesity and sedentary lifestyles.
anikom15 3y ago
Most people don’t move that far from where they grow up. City populations have more to do with a select few choosing where they want to live and either having lots of babies, or convincing other people to come to them. Once the city is established, most of its population growth is self-sustaining.
TexanFeller 3y ago
> Rural living gets constantly gassed up as this incredibly serene, peaceful place to live and yet even in the age of remote work people aren’t budging. One big reason is that remote work was never guaranteed to last. It's starting to crumble now with big tech requiring RTO x days a week or factoring in physical presence into performance reviews. People that aren't already independently wealthy couldn't risk buying a house in the country. In my rural home town your options for work if you lost your tech job(easier because crappy internet options) would be hard labor on a farm or dairy or maybe work at the grocery or fast food joint - nothing else.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
Anecdotal counterpoint, since the beginning of the pandemic response my wife and I moved onto a farm with a few dozen acres and are slowly building it up to a homestead. A catw majority of people stayed in cities, or are moving back, but some did vote with their feet and left for the country. It's important to not that it might be easy to#if hear from those that started in cities, anyone that moved more rural may be out of your field of view and seemingly not exist.
bequanna 3y ago
First of all, what do you mean by "Rural living"? Living in a town of 20k people? 10k? 500? Or on an acreage/cabin a half mile from neighbors? All of these are pretty distinct experiences. Let's just say any town <20k people is considered rural. From what I've seen, it is almost unheard of for someone who was not raised in a rural area to successfully live long term in an area like this. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of seeing retirees leave the city and try to live full time in a remote cabin on a recreational lake. None of them lasted more than a couple years. A surprising number of divorces. Growing up in a small town I have plenty of similar stories of families moving in from a larger city and leaving shortly after. I'm not exactly sure how to explain this but generally I think the challenges of rural living (weather, social, economic, isolation, etc.) are very difficult if someone isn't familiar. As you mention, people see the benefits (incredibly serene, peaceful place, etc) but I think many aren't expecting or prepared for the challenges.

stinkytaco 3y ago

I also don't know the solution, but I'm reasonably sure closing essential services like hospitals is not part of it. Unfortunately, the kind of policies that might keep those places open get soundly rejected by people who live in those communities, or at least by the people who represent them. I grew up in a rural community and am sometimes wistful for it, but I don't want to move far away from medical care, internet, reliable power, and other basic services and all of those have only gotten worse where I grew up.

USB5 3y ago

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nobody9999 3y ago

>We've come a long way since Jefferson, Adams, and Madison opined that cities were "the natural enemies of virtue and happiness." While I don't want to go back to a world where more than 50% of the population is solely bound to food production, I do feel like we're losing something. The real tension in the US, rural vs urban (not red vs blue), just continues to grow worse. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that robust systems usually avoid centralization, favoring variety and redundancy instead. One of the big issues (at least AFAICT) is the lack of good paying jobs in reasonable proximity to rural areas. Why is that? Among other things, one issue seems to be a lack of specific kinds of infrastructure in rural areas: High-speed rail and high-speed internet connectivity. High-speed rail with hubs in urban (or urban-adjacent) areas can provide reasonable access for folks to commute to where the jobs are. High-speed internet connectivity would allow for (some) businesses to start and thrive in rural areas. Improving such infrastructure in rural areas would encourage (at least for a while), urban/suburban dwellers to move to more rural areas without compromising their earnings ability. And if such a migration is made possible/desirable, other businesses supporting those new residents (apartment buildings, bars/restaurants, cultural activities and a raft of other opportunities will present themselves for other, local, businesses. Would moving stuff like this be easy? No. There are a whole bunch of issues that block creating such infrastructure and the business environment that would depend upon such infrastructure. That said, urban/suburban folks moving to a functional (in terms of access and services) rural areas will increase the incentives for other businesses (hospitals, anyone?) to come to, remain and/or expand in rural areas. This would reduce some of the pressure on housing prices in urban/suburban areas and revitalize the economies of rural areas. I don't expect to see such movement in the near to medium term, and more's the pity. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't advocate for such things. Edit: Fixed typo.

prottog 3y ago
> High-speed rail with hubs in urban (or urban-adjacent) areas can provide reasonable access for folks to commute to where the jobs are. You don't need HSR for this. Actually, high-speed rail and commuting are mutually exclusive, because commuter rail lines stop way too often to reach even rural two-lane highway speeds. The TGV is very nice and will get you from Reims to La Defense, about a hundred miles of commute, in an hour and a half (via Paris l'Est), but only because Reims happens to be on the TGV trunk line and has a stop. If you're coming in from Vaires-sur-Marne, which that same TGV line goes through but doesn't stop at? About an hour to La Defense on the commuter RER despite covering less than a third of the distance.

hayst4ck 3y ago

The tension is not rural vs urban. It is educated vs the uneducated. It is urban vs rural because rural folks are less educated and therefore more susceptible to forces that are predatory to those who do not make a practice of critical thinking, such as fox news (or worse). I don't think it's controversial to say that education liberalizes. Here's Nate Silver talking about education as a predictor of the 2016 election: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pr... > In short, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. Here is Pew weighing in: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideo...

mbg721 3y ago
The people you're upset about mostly aren't rural, they're outer-suburban and they aren't buying the values that you're selling.
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  The tragedy of the commons is a tragedy because it requires the fishermen who would otherwise fish the sea empty to not fish as much as they could. Why would any individual fisherman be happy with quotas? So I won't deny that they don't want (some of) those values, but that is why education is important, to see that if you aren't willing to make sacrifices (to say fight global warming) then you will be forced into even worse situations.
prottog 3y ago
> rural folks are less educated and therefore more susceptible to forces that are predatory to those who do not make a practice of critical thinking > I don't think it's controversial to say that education liberalizes Highly-educated city folks make totally preposterous claims with zero critical thinking all the time. So you're right that education tends to liberalize, but wrong that education somehow makes people engage in more critical thinking. I posit that for every piece of garbage that comes out of Fox News, there's an equal and opposite piece of garbage coming out of MSNBC.

woodruffw 3y ago

Putting aside the rest of the comment: I don't know how living away from where all of the redundant infrastructure in any given country is can be considered "robust" in any meaningful sense.

msla 3y ago

Some hallmarks of rural living as I have known it: - Mom-and-pop restaurants that are just Sysco retail outlets. - Three screen movie theaters that only play the absolute most popular films. - Underfunded schools. - After-school activities that amounted to drinking, driving, drugs, or all three. - Empty main streets. - No local theater, bands, or culture in general. - Absolutely no transit options beyond driving yourself or walking, and walking on rural roads is dangerous.

rektide 3y ago
I hope we see ebikes become a valid option in more places. There's alas many places where there's poor/no shoulder or it's just otherwise be way to unsafe. But it's soo nice having such an unencumbered light way to get around.
- msla 3y ago
  Ebikes would help, but I honestly don't think anything of that sort other than electric cars and trucks will get much uptake. As you said, there's often no shoulder, and, due to low population density, there's little upkeep done on roads, especially in the winter and after storms. In short, unless your vehicle can handle snow, ice, and animals, it isn't a complete solution, not to mention the cargo capacity needed to not have to go shopping every day when the grocery store is miles away.

Terr_ 3y ago

> We've come a long way since Jefferson, Adams, and Madison opined that cities were "the natural enemies of virtue and happiness." A casual search for that quote shows no results, is it a paraphrasing of something? Either way, some skepticism is needed when one considers the source: Wealthy landowners that didn't need a city near them in order to command conveniences and comforts in their mansions, estates, and/or plantations.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Jefferson, Adams and Madison took one side of a long debate. I'm sure there were founding fathers with different views. Maybe Franklin: https://www.city-journal.org/article/benjamin-franklin-city-slicker https://www.city-journal.org/article/benjamin-franklin-city-...

nine_k 3y ago

The US have a large number of large and important cities, so it's not that centralized. It's not like the UK / London thing. Redundancy and resilience have n associated cost. Not everybody is keen to pay this cost, especially when the benefits do not seem large. As every complex thing, it's a matter of balance.

Balgair 3y ago

> The real tension in the US, rural vs urban (not red vs blue) As usual, it depends. For example, out west the tension is with water rights. All other political issues are like molehills to the mountain that is water. To be clear, the western US states aren't running out of water, they are running out of cheap water. Usually, this pit the mountains against the farmers/ranchers, but it affects the whole population of a state in changing and varied ways. Divides are formed and forgotten every 20 years or so. So, no, the real tensions aren't in the US's population centering methods, it's in dozens of different ways at dozens of different times and places. Thinking that ~350M people can be divided in any black-white manner for any length of time is a failure of imagination.

bumby 3y ago
Devils advocate: isn't this just the same rural/urban divide illustrated through a different lens? It could be similarly portrayed as rural agriculture water rights vs. city dwellers water rights. Both want cheap water. Both point to the unsustainable practices of the other regarding water usage.
- Balgair 3y ago
  Sometimes yes, often no. In CA, there is a huge North-South divide when it comes to water. Northern CA constantly complains about LA 'stealing' all the water. In this case, it's urban vs urban. In CO, it's rural mountain areas where the water comes from versus the rural plains ranchers where the water is needed. Frontrange cities mostly have their own water rights figured out, mostly. In UT, it's just a hell of a mess and everyone is angry at everyone else and the Great Salt Lake becomes ever more that little brine pond over there. Then you add in all the compacts along the Colorado and everyone just has more to fight about. I guess you can sorta squint and say it's urban v. rural in some cases. And that would only be due to the square mileage per capita in the definitions. But, it's so much more than that and so much more complicated and legalistic and messy. The only common thread in the western US is water and how there just isn't enough of it for cheap.
  - bumby 3y ago

nitwit005 3y ago

Living with the land, in a traditional manner, I can see making some people happy. Industrial agriculture and mining, I cannot. Don't romanticize dangerous jobs working for some corporation.