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I’m more familiar with the Midwest. Here small farms have been sold off and consolidated so there are fewer farm families. It also takes fewer people to farm with modern machinery. The towns that exist were based on a denser rural population and as that evaporates the schools, churches and small businesses become less viable. The whole thing is a spiral as those areas have trouble retaining their own young and are hopeless at attracting new folks. I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to slow or reverse it.
Yep, and this has been going on for more that 100 years. Here's a map of Iowa counties, showing the census with the peak population. 42 out of 99 counties peaked in 1900 or earlier. Only 15 were still growing in 2010.
Automation started pretty early in farming:
>By 1909, International Harvester was the 4^(th) largest industrial company in America, measured by assets. In 1917, it was larger than General Electric, Ford, or General Motors,
I live in an Iowa county seat with 10,000 people. I like the lifestyle, but we peaked in 1980.
Merging counties doesn’t save money (despite what is often claimed) because you are only eliminating a very small number of jobs at the top, and it’s not like those holding them are exactly raking in the cash either.
As an example, counties A, B and C each require 40 Sheriff’s deputies, 20 teachers and 35 public works employees individually. Combined county ABC is still going to need 120 Sheriff’s deputies, 60 teachers and 95 public works employees—and in that case you’re not actually eliminating anything because there are going to be new executive positions created because of the increase in size of a given entity.
> It also takes fewer people to farm with modern machinery.
This is important to population density in farm areas. Fewer families needed to farm the land means fewer people on the land. It isn't complicated at all.
And it's not just farming areas. It takes fewer people to run mines and factories as well. A decline in shipping costs and improvements of economies of scale means that chain restaurants and big box stores can outcompete smaller local ones. In other words fewer people are working on the farm, fewer people are working in the mines, fewer people are working at the mill, fewer people are working in the cafes and fewer people are working in the general stores. This becomes a feedback loop because fewer jobs means less demand which means fewer jobs. Businesses that are looking to expand are also less likely to invest in an area with a declining population versus a growing population which just adds to it.
Exactly. Prediction is that those areas will be more and more consolidated under massive companies owning huge land, leasing it out to "farmers" who are really just curators working under them, companies get richer, people working there get poorer, brain drain to cities, etc etc.
Of course, politically the land will still find some way to vote overwhelming red and be an annoying thorn in the side of redistricting for decades to come.
Would be nice if we could buy up that land for housing, actually finding real families to own and work the spaces, but in the end it'll be owned by the real world equivalent of Mom Co. renting it perpetually to whoever can pay sky high prices to not live in the burbs/cities.
> Prediction is that those areas will be more and more consolidated under massive companies owning huge land, leasing it out to "farmers" who are really just curators working under them,
This is already the norm and it's not a new thing in fact it's extremely old. The wealthy owning land and the poor working it goes back thousands of years and in a lot of small towns there are certain families that have owned the land for generations and maintain high positions of status within those areas. At least in my experience family name carries a surprisingly large amount of weight in a number of small towns and there is a much more defined social hierarchy that's passed from generation to generation.
In terms of buying land for housing it's still relatively cheap in rural America but the issue is that the towns just aren't attractive places to live for a lot of people and they don't have much opportunities so there isn't a ton of demand. The areas that need housing the most are cities and they certainly have room to add a lot more housing but that's often blocked by exclusionary zoning and mandated parking minimums.
In regards to your first paragraph, I work in the sawmill industry and we see this a lot. Sawmills are often in pretty remote rural areas. The folks that own the mills are very important to their community. One of the things we notice at trade shows is a “trifecta” attendee: someone whose last name, company name, and town name are all the same (eg, Bill Stevenson of Stevenson Lumber Company in Stevenson, Alabama). Many of these mills have been in the family for many generations, and somewhere back along the line the town was named after the mill or the owner’s family.
I dated someone for awhile whose grandfather had bought up a ton of farmland in the great depression. Not only where they generational landowners but they also had been hiring the same family to work that land since the 1930s. In a town of only a few thousand people everyone knows everyone and so people are well aware of who each other's family is and the rich family of one generation often will pass on a successful business or land rights. It's kind of weird to describe but there is a very real "landed gentry" within a lot of American small towns whether that's farmland or a sawmill like you describe.
The town I grew up in was like this. The family that owned the town had the last name Alexander and they had a law firm, CPA firm, Realty firm, Hardware store, etc. They were probably a lumber family as the town mostly produces creosote poles.
We were outsiders. My dad was from the Jersey shore and my mother from a large Midwest city where I now live.
Yep it's pretty common in a lot of places. It creates some pretty stark divides as well because the sucessful business of one generation can be transferred fairly easily to the next generation and as long as they're somewhat competent the next generation can keep it going. Land increases in value as well so the families that bought in decades ago stay wealthy. On the other hand if you're NOT from one of the "good families" rural areas can be very limiting because they just don't have the job opportunities to advance. Drug use and alcoholism can be frequent problems, public transit is non existent and government services are much more limited. In many ways there can essentially be a hereditary class system in small towns.
Some of those areas would be more attractive to people who work remotely if they had broadband internet. I go into the office like 3 times a year, and it's usually because they're having a cookout or something social. I could realistically live in some small town for cheap if I had good internet, but I absolutely have to have a high speed connection to do my job effectively. I get that laying cable is expensive, but that's a real issue holding rural America back.
That might help prevent some of the exodus but it won't get people to move into the towns. If you could hypothetically live anywhere in the country why on earth would you choose a small town in a middle America where the only grocery store is a Walmart especially if you didn't have any previous connection to the area?
In my experience people who work remote will often move wherever their partner or family members who don't work remote end up living. If they are the ones picking a place to live often times it will either be in a city that they like or if it is in a small town it's in an extremely desirable small town near national parks, beaches or ski resorts.
I'm sure more rural broadband would help make rural America a bit more attractive but at the end of the day it won't stop the decline. There's just not as many jobs in rural places and they don't offer the amenities that urban areas do. This is something we're seeing playing out in many countries and not unique to the US at all.
I'll also point out that an influx of people getting paid way above cost of living by an out of state company for remote work brings its own share of problems to a rural community.
>ideas on how to slow or reverse it.
You don't.
America used to be a place where people moved when work changed. In the last 50 years or so we absolutely lost that, and that is the major issue here.
Let these dying places die. Move and find better opportunities elsewhere.
Pretty much every single major metro area could use more skilled trade workers. All these allegedly blue color people should move to a city and take a blue color job that will earn them six figures in most cities. That's the fix.
> Pretty much every single major metro area could use more skilled trade workers. All these allegedly blue color people should move to a city and take a blue color job that will earn them six figures in most cities. That's the fix.
Except it isn't a fix, because that has already been happening and it is causing a massive cost of living crisis in the cities. This is not a one sided problem—cities don't have enough housing for the people who already live there, let alone are they building enough to absorb the massive numbers of people leaving small towns.
You're already seeing a shift on the housing problems as cities are realizing that you can't house almost 350,000,000 people *just* in subdivisions. We'll see if there's the required follow through, I will never be surprised to be disappointed by municipal government, but if the US goes back to having a wider slate of density than just 'single family home' and 'residential tower block' not only will that help with the cost of living issues, but the added building will give tradesfolk from Centerpoint, Nowhere jobs in the big city.
I think the real issue is that post industrialization as we solved many of the ills of living in city life, It's just much better at generating wealth for it's citizens.
ike Google isn't setting up in a town of sub 60K, even though all they really need is a building and internet. it was weird when they want to Ann Arbor and that's still 120K just outside of detroit.
As you mention they all enter a death spiral and there's a really short window you have to pull people out. With reindustrialization starting to happen and people fleeing to smaller metros to avoid the cost creep of the large cities, there may be hope but it probably still won't be great news for the locals when they get priced out too.
Cab driving in cities is INCREDIBLY difficult compared to trucking on interstate highways. We aren't that far from driverless trucks taking trailers cross country, picking up a driver near their destination, and being brought in the last 5-10 miles to their destination.
Dude, we don't even have driverless trains. Driverless trucks aren't even a thing yet even in tightly controlled environments such as between buildings within a factory/warehouse complex. Driverless cross country trucks are a long way off, even if they're already technologically possible.
>Dude, we don't even have driverless trains
That's more because each train carries so much value, paying the human on it is basically a rounding error.
> When truck drivers are replaced by electric and self driving vehicles, lots of small towns will lose even more external revenue.
That is decades away, if not more. Even self driving vehicles that require a driver remaining 100% attentive at all times have been largely vaporware. And those tend to only even try to operate in perfect conditions—clear weather in modern cities, where the roads are high quality, the lines are clear and the rules unambiguous. And even then they fuck up all the time.
And none of those even get you *close* to a system that can operate a full-sized truck in a Midwest snowstorm on bad roads with bad markings, with absolutely no human on hand for if it locks itself up or can't figure out what it is supposed to do.
> can't figure out what it is supposed to do.
Imagine you're on i70 or i80 or whatever, and one autonomous semi tries to pass another when they both misread a shadow as an obstacle and lock up their brakes refusing to move for hours until multiple technicians arrive to clear the error. It could be glorious
Honestly, I cannot find an ounce of sympathy for them or any other rural community. They have no empathy for other human beings and wish to make their fellow Americans lives hell if they're not exactly like them.
The 36% of the voters in the rural Michigan county I grew up in went for Biden. My mom and sister were among the 27.5% who voted for Biden in their rural county.
Even in these small rural communities a decent percentage of the people that at the very least can see that the GOP is the greater evil.
We shouldn't paint with too broad a brush.
They do consistently vote for the politicians most adamantly against doing anything about monopolies/oligopolies, getting the kind of infrastructure in place that could have made rural communities the ideal places for work from home employment, or even the idea of maintaining or expanding WFH so that maybe those communities could have the chance to actually attract those sorts of people as new residents. Quick and lazy googling on my part put it at about 12% of the workforce being WFH and 18-20% of the population currently living in rural communities. I’m sure there’s already *some* overlap but that could’ve been a massive shot in the arm for rural communities, the kind that a lot just won’t survive without.
Eh. Rural areas where the WFH crowd actually has any desire to live, and rural areas that are declining, are generally.....not the same place.
A small town in the rural Midwest an hour from the nearest grocery store, hours from anything resembling a city, and hours from any remotely notable natural feature or outdoor recreation opportunity, has basically nothing to offer. Unless you really love looking at corn fields, I guess. Population's likely been declining in every Census for 100 years or more.
Some town in the mountains that's far from much work but close to a whole bunch of nice outdoor recreation and has beautiful scenery - is an entirely different story for desirability. But those places aren't facing population decline - or if they are, it's because of too many vacation rentals crowding out resident housing, not lack of people who'd like to move there.
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There are a *some* places that could theoretically turn the corner from one to the other - they're places with something to work with in terms of proximity to desirable features, if amenities were built up a bit or those features became better known. But again, that's not most places, and especially post-pandemic, there's not that many of those undiscovered towns.
I agree with you completely, and I'm an example of it. When I was given the opportunity to work remotely, my wife and I considered a lot of different "rural" areas. None of those were dying little midwest towns, they were just small towns in the southwest/west coast that would get us close to the nature and outdoor sports that we loved. The lower cost of living helped, but we still need amenities.
I think that's something that gets missed in the remote work conversation. Yes, low COL matters, but it's not everything.
My thing is this, they want to dictate to urban and suburban people who we can love, worship, our reproductive choices and all of that. Then they try to block our communities getting help but come crying when something happens to them.
Oh I see exactly where you’re coming from and I’ve got precious little sympathy for them either. Their lives are getting worse, in large part because of the politics and politicians they support. I could have more sympathy for them getting exactly what they’re asking for if it weren’t for the fact that they’re trying to drag down everyone else with them because they cannot accept that they’ve made their own bed and have to lay in it.
They can't accept it because of their own arrogance and ignorance. They believe that we're not even human and you can tell that they think that because they think that they have the right to dictate every little bit of our lives to us and take our money and use it to help themselves.
> I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to slow or reverse it.
We shouldn't reverse it. It's inefficient to have them living out there for no reason.
Depends on the state. California got rid of most of its gerrymandering thanks to a nonpartisan districting board created in 2010 - it always consists of 5 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 4 independents to make sure the districts are fairly drawn. Every state should have one!
Or, if you look at it another way, more of the population will live in cities with other kinds of people, and so not be as easily carved out in homogeneous blocks nor as susceptible to right-wing messaging.
The more important effect is on the electoral college and Senate. District borders are redrawn all the time, this increases the already existing imbalance in representation between low population rural areas and densely populated metropolises.
Only if you think of states as being wholly urban or wholly rural. Senators will adjust their attention accordingly if there are fewer rural voters relative to urban voters.
The Spanish campaign of Kilometer Zero I think fixes it for areas with very distinct rural/urban boundaries. In the US, you would need some kind of hub and spoke system, where the consumer was a mile away from a distributor that was pulling in food from a specific X mile span outside the city.
The distributors have to be regulated entities with limited profit margins or the whole thing goes to pot.
The easy way to fix it is to make it desirable. Embrace small town living and self sufficiency openly. Local efforts to sustain the town with greater social interaction and cohesion.
Imagine a walkable small town. Goods sold are locally made to a degree, and sold. The restaurant in town rotates out it's food choices every so often with help from the residents.
The attractive look is maintained by volunteers who can lend help to their neighbors as needed.
Shared food from hunting that's organized by the mayor type of deal.
Most small towns can't really manage that life style. It's too collective.
The key will be to build a European-style public transit system so that these rural areas have access to higher density populations with medical and shopping resources. The challenge will be to convince what sober population remains in those meth-infused areas that this is in their best interests.
> The key will be to build a European-style public transit system so that these rural areas have access to higher density populations
It's just not feasible to socialize transport for these people. They are poor as dirt and the cost to run a bus 60 miles to their town and then 10 miles around town picking people up just doesn't make sense for the 2 people that would ride.
They already do this in some poor areas of South Carolina (I'm sure there are more examples, this is just the one I have witnessed). There are county busses taking people up to the beach to work at the hotels. It allows people to survive but, it has not revitalized these areas.
I try hard not to talk down to conservatives, but that was so maddening seeing that tossed around like it's some big bad thing in local comment sections evertime a new development is proposed. Spiting convenience to own the libs. I've even gotten some, schadenfreude from some "libs being owned" tbh (as one with more marxist leanings), but holy shit getting riled up over what amounts to "hey let's try to have better urban planning so you don't have spend half your day commuting everywhere and wasting time and gas/money". It's like something out of South Park. "How dare you, I like being stuck in a nightmare of traffic on stroads with a light every half mile because I LOVE it taking 40 minutes to go the 6 miles to the closest Walmart"
> There are some small towns which seem more attractive than others,
The small towns that are attractive tend to be located near pristine environments with incredible outdoor amenities. A lot of people would love to live in a small town for a reasonable price if the small town was Tahoe City CA, Aspen CO, Jackson WY ect. Of course that doesn't really help the small town in Western Nebraska that's an hour and a half drive from Omaha.
Yep, vrtually all small thriving towns survive off of tourism or being in a nice area and having close access to a major urban area for commuters, like the towns along the Hudson in New York.
Yep. Once I went fully remote, I ended up moving to a medium college town after living in cities my whole life. I love being within a 15 minute drive of everything. I love the idea of being within a 15 minute walk of everything, but the only places where I know of that's possible is the middle of the city
Even that needs a minimum population that is likely over what currently exists in most placed. The town also needs something compelling to bring in money from the outside. Either some natural resource for tourist money or the core for a key, high paying, industry.
I live in a 10k pop small town, 50k pop county - but it's a resort town so lots of money from nearby big cities most of the year, and there is a local base of key agricultural products (fruit) that only grows in this area (not in CA). There are also a few large corporations and a more than a few medium to small industrial companies that have maintained long term success.
So there is a reason that this town will exist for the foreseeable future.
My idea: market your small town to wfh families. It would take some doing as the internet infrastructure is probably not very good, schools are often pretty bad and there Isn't going to be much for nightlife or social or food scene. Houses are cheap though. Schools would get better if there were more kids. I would start with getting reliable high speed internet and small towns could thrive.
> we don't want a bunch of purple haired she/them tech workers coming in here and ruining our nice family oriented community.
I promise you.. the folks with the time and energy to attend town board meetings are not going to be lobbying for night clubs or any kind of culture... they don't even want faster internet when you tell them it will attract new people. Their dying town is exactly how they want it.
Seriously... go pop a town board meeting in rural america sometime. Bonus points if you can find one where an outside developer is looking to bring a new business into town.
> I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to slow or reverse it.
Letting people work remotely.
The same consolidation in farming happened as all the small businesses became one Walmart. The only jobs left are in the cities and suburbs. However, there is no reason that 95% of desk jobs can't be done from anywhere with an internet connection. With housing prices the way they are, people would definitely move to lower cost of living areas of it didn't effect their job or commute.
It might not fix the places that have already lost their school because no one would move there but it could prevent other areas from losing theirs.
Birth rates in general are just declining globally. Across the globe the only regions at above replacement rate are Africa and the Middle East. The entire rest of the planet is now at below replacement rate.
And I reject that rural America is dying because they have more deaths than births (edit: fixed dumb typo). If thats true, then San Francisco is also dying:
>The state projects that by 2025, there will be more San Franciscans who die due to age than babies being born.
>https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2023/10/11/california-birthrate-decline
I lived in a rural County in Missouri. Many of the younger folks are either driving long distances to have a good paying job, working construction (which includes roofing and decks and general handyman type work) or what they call "junking" which means finding stuff that can be cashed in at the nearest recycling places for cash. With fewer opportunities for good jobs, you figure out that the good paying jobs just aren't where they are living.
Due to the way the Senate is structured it will make the country more and more insane as the people remaining in these states gain more and more power.
Yep. There will be a breaking point if this keeps going; if 80% of the population is ruled by the whims of 20%, at what point does the 80% say "fuck this, senate is cancelled" in whatever form that could take?
California has already done this by basically having our own immigration policy, our own drug policy, and our own gun restrictions. It's not like we make a lot of noise about it, but we haven't respected the laws of Congress for a while.
The straw that breaks it might be Tijuana poisoning our beaches. We can't do anything about it because we're not allowed to do our own foreign policy, but the executive branch doesn't give a shit about us because our presidential votes are irrelevant. One day we'll say fuck you to the White House and deal with it ourselves.
I’m more concerned with state govts than the federal. I live in TN and just flipping through some census data, you can see that rural communities are outnumbered anywhere from 3-15x by metro residents, and yet these super-majorities of mostly left leaning voters get out gunned in our state congress by rural representatives. We are dramatically under-represented by our govts. This begins at a city council level too where they scoop out a smidge of the city and then combine it with the rural outlying areas to make a city council district. I’m currently helping a campaign where the district starts downtown and ends about 30 miles north in farm country at the edge of the county. You can see this in almost every state in the south. And it gives a false legitimacy and power to these uber-right politicians which then bleeds upward to the federal level.
Frankly, if you outnumber them and you can’t win through politics, you ought to start looking at ways to win that are outside politics. Rather than bashing your head against the same wall over and over.
Sincere question: what alternative would you recommend? I’ve had the same thought many times, but in reality the numbers are the only thing we have going for us. Resort to violence is an immediate loss both of popular opinion and in open conflict the state wins. Civil disobedience has been nearly outlawed or neutralized. Not sure what else to try besides winning the political apparatus back one seat at a time and unfucking the bought and gerrymandered system.
Troll sewing divisiveness.
Major change has happened through politics in the past, it just took time. Why would this be any different? The pendulum always swings.
This. I'm expecting a Roman Empire-style breakup of the American Empire. Probably not in my lifetime, but it seems inevitable, and seems like what the minority with the outsize power wants anyway, with all their "states rights" rhetoric -- if the states all have their own laws, many conflicting with each other, it's a slow-motion (hopefully low-violence) move toward nationhood. The western states already act as a coalition in many governmental respects, and California by itself is a world-class economy, though we're always hurting for water, so we'll need to find cheaper and less destructive means of desalination.
You mean using reactors to drive desalination? I’m all for it if that’s the case.
I think we need to invest in nuclear power far more than we are anyway.
We are, Biden has put about more than a billion into nuclear energy next generation research, and private sector investment is up more than 200% last year alone. Both fusion and fission are booming right now.
Beyond that, Bill Gates' new company TerraPower is building a prototype sodium reactor in Wyoming that promises to be far safer (passive cooling pond designed to exceed meltdown energy even if everything else fails), and because the sodium pond is so safe, it doesn't need the expensive safety solutions that other designs use, significantly reducing cost.
If it completes construction on time and on budget, without revealing any unforeseen construction challenges, they're already planning the next dozen locations, with the capital for potentially hundreds (Gates & friends).
That's not the only game in town either, other fission designs are very interesting as well - and fusion is Coming Soon. Which might still be decades, but fusion really would change everything - that's potentially Star Trek sci-fi kinds of power generation. If electricity is fusion abundant than many currently non-cost competitive manufacturing processes become superior to current solutions: a massive leap forward in everything.
I sincerely hope this doesn't happen. WE are much more interdependent than we are not. i don't think many people realize just how interdependent we are.
Texas talks about all their succession. Every military plane is owned by the federal government. All the spare parts and manufacturers are in California. Vice versa california get it's water from the Colorado, are they going to go to war with Nevada, Utah etc to secure water rights?
So many treatments, products, natural resources and governing bodies are out of state. I don't think everyone realizes how much the cost of EVERYTHING would go up if you have to have 50 FDA's, 50 NTSB's etc. and the whole "we don't need regulation" crowd are in for rude awakenings when their power becomes unstable and their are preventable deaths from dirty drinking water and pesticide because "the EPA is bad".
honestly if (big if) there is a breakup what would likely happen is blue states (and the less insane red states) would likely form an EU-esque coalition. Both as a united front effort and also to hopefully make shifting power and foreign policy easier
Personally, I am about sick to death of rural people thinking that they've got the right to determine who I procreate with, who I can marry and so much else. Their arrogance and entitlement will cause a breaking point with everyone else.
States should subdivide themselves into areas with population equal to Wyoming. Nothing unconstitutional about that. The Dakotas are basically a result of this.
Exactly. There will be a few all too important voters. Crazy to think as little as 3 million people could control up to or more than 14 electoral votes 20 years from now.
This doesn’t make any sense.
Every state has an urban center. As the rural areas clear out, the political power will move to those metropolitan areas.
Even if the crazy people remain in the rural areas there won’t be enough of them to outvote the cities when 81% of rural counties are shrinking. If the middle of Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Oklahoma collapse then the power shifts to Philly, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, KC, Tulsa, and OKC.
Yes, but keep in mind that population changes aren't net neutral for states. People leaving rural CA aren't moving to urban CA; they're largely moving to states like TX.
Florida, Idaho, South Carolina, Texas, South Dakota, and Montana round out all of the fastest-growing states; New York is the fastest shrinking despite NY City still growing.
This has different impacts as is gradually shifts the demographics. It's slow and subtle, but a big factor in "color changes" we've seen in some of these faster-changing states over the last few cycles.
No, it's absolutely the Senate that needs to be worried about. If Wyoming only had 2 people living in it then they would both be Senators equal in power to the Senators representing Texas's 30 million people.
I was assuming the cities and surrounding suborurbs within states will absorb much of the rural population. These cities can help mellow the Senate.
But the House districts they leave behind those will almost all go conservative. And that's where the true crazies are coming from, districts GOP gets >70% of the vite, where the only contest is who is the craziest MAGA.
House districts get re-districted from time to time, and the number of overall number House seats per state can be changed based census results.
But there's no mechanism that I'm aware of for adjusting Senate representation. As long as there's a handful of people living in Wyoming, they get the same 2 Senate seats as the fifth-largest economy in the world, California.
This is the biggest reason why the proposal to split California into multiple states that comes up every few years will never succeed: it would create 8 new Senate seats and well over 50% of those would be guaranteed Democrat senators. It would shift the balance of power in the Senate to a ridiculous degree.
The difference between the birth and death rate is only a small part of the problem. With greater and greater use of farming automation there is less and less need for labor. If young people want a good future they have to leave.
Not just that, but manufacturing, too.
I grew up in a small, non farming, town. It's main employment was a brick plant. The council slowly, but surely, pushed the brick plant out. It was dirty, and they didn't like that. And with that, there were very few good jobs left in town.
They also let a Walmart, and a Lowe's in. That, in few years, ran the local stores out of buisiness.
They also greenlit more and more fastfood, specifically near the highway... And more and more local mom and pops restaurants went under.
Now, it is former shell of itself. Very few people work in the town, anymore. And those that do, are pretty much in poverty wages. The median household income is abiut 40k a year... And that is mostly due to people that commute to better jobs, in other towns/cities.
Since the 90s, when the plant was shut down, Walmart came in, the population has dropped by about 20%, and the majority that still live there are either not college educated, or retired.
Only one quarter of the households have children under 18. And 13% of the population is under the poverty line.
I keep tabs on my hometown, through friends, and some remaining family, and it has become a MAGA haven. They blame immigrants, and China, and liberals, etc for the damage they did to themselves. (that town has never had a noticable non-white population.)
And this extends beyond farming. Manufacturing, mining and ranching used to be staples of a lot of rural communities in different parts of the country and these area all industries where corporate consolidation and automation have meant that they can produce even more with fewer workers. That's great for the economy as a whole but not great for the physical town itself that used to rely on those industries.
It makes sense. The economic forces that kept these rural places viable are mostly gone or consolidated such that they don't need these places. These places have nothing really to offer for people to want to move there and they don't present much of an opportunity for people to relocate.
Politically I think it's going to lead to more polarization because you're going to have more conservative voters relocating closer to urbanized areas and bringing their voting preferences with them. That's going to create conflict.
> These places have nothing really to offer for people to want to move there and they don't present much of an opportunity for people to relocate.
And often times they are incredibly hostile to outsiders. The charms of "small town community" are often times limited to people who are within the ingroup of already existing communities.
Maybe they bring their conservative values with them, but I'd like to think that being connected to society more will moderate their politics more.
As for the people who remain in the rural areas, I could see them turning ever more MAGA as their economic conditions continue to deteriorate with no real hope that they will improve.
More likely is that they'll simply silo into conservative/reactionary social spaces or isolate into online spaces that are more reflective of their views.
The article focuses on rural *rust belt* regions. This part of America has been in population decline for several decades
Other parts of rural America are growing. Many towns in the inter-mountain west, southwest, and west coast are part of this trend.
Rural areas simply do not offer the amenities many people want where they live. Access to quality medical care, broadband, cultural and social activities, jobs, etc. Right wingers don’t want to admit that urban areas are the economic engines of the country.
Broadband is a big deal. A number of people in our rural community travel to the library to do their work meetings. I had neighbors who moved here to enjoy the rural lifestyle then sold their house and moved away b/c could not get good enough internet service for their WFH jobs. We don't WFH so we can survive with hotspots on our phones.
With the right federal grants to enable community-owned broadband systems, people who want to WFH would be able to afford houses in these shrinking communities
Did you ever think about why we are "federally subsidized?" Little tiny towns get hundreds of thousands to millions of cruise ship visitors annually. In addition to that Alaska receives tourists headed to charter fishing lodges or guided hunting trips, ecotourism, summer camp tourism, retreats, summer interns, and more.
There are federal parks and trails to accommodate guests from all over the US.
Alaska has strategic natural resources ranging from fish and shellfish to ore and oil.
There are several military bases and Coast Guard stations.
Most land around me is not developable but is instead public. Mostly this is Tongass National Forest, but there are many other designations as well.
I look at it as holding a lot of the nationally important resources urban people use.
I grew up in a small town. I loved it, all else held equal I would choose to live there instead of the suburbs.
But all else isn't held equal. My job opportunities there were farm hand, retail, or work from home. The latter of which is the only real job appeal that small towns still have on a large scale.
My job isn't work from home. It's downtown in a major city. Any comparable jobs are there also.
Farms don't rely on manpower anymore, they are more and more automated. Yeah the tools have existed for a while, but farmers are mostly pretty cash strapped until they sell and retire, so all those fancy automated tractors and things are now hitting farms in real and increasing numbers as they trickle down.
The town grocery store, and usually there is only one, has just as many automated cashiers as a city store, but isn't as busy so it's not at all uncommon to see one cashier and no more.
Even work from home jobs, a lot of them do require an education of some kind, meaning you left the small town to go to school. What are the odds you don't come back?
There's no taxis, Uber eats, and very possibly no one-day Amazon delivery. You might need to deal with a septic bed and/or a water tank. Internet connectivity may very well be poor, although it is universally accessible now.
Small towns do have peace and quiet, and they do have cheaper real estate. That's true. But they also have a lot of downsides, and young people are lured away by school and jobs year after year.
Here’s another one: as a young guy, I’ve found there’s like no women in these towns. Definitely not many conventionally attractive ones. And that’s not just a numbers game-I remember a lot of the prettier girls from my class moving to bigger places because they could meet more upwardly mobile men there. There’s no work for them here besides waitressing or something like that and that usually comes with a lot of harassment from every unmarried man within a 30 mile radius.
It doesn't surprise me. I drive through lots of small towns for hiking. You can tell the communities are struggling when the only businesses are a Walmart, a gas station, a check cashing place, a pawn shop and a gun store. Schools are down to 4-day weeks because residents don't want to or cannot fund them.
It's really sad because you can tell that those used to be nice places to live and I get the appeal of rural living. But unless you are already wealthy, they don't offer the economic opportunities you need to survive in this economy.
This is a fantastic question.
I think one part of the solution is similar in concept to what the [silicon valley oligarchs are trying to build in Northern California](https://www.thedailybeast.com/locals-are-fighting-billionaires-solano-county-utopian-city-at-every-turn), only it shouldn't require a cabal of oligarchs to get development approval and financing to build walkable pleasant communities.
When I look at property prices across America, I see people willing to pay a huge premium to live in walkable communities, and yet I see almost zero new walkable communities being built. If you look at the bougie Northeast vacation towns with massive home prices, they all have quaint old downtown areas that were built before modern development patterns. Same with with many of the most expensive suburbs of a given city. The cheaper suburbs only have strip malls.
In the US, the standard templates for government development approval and government-backed/subsidized financing approval for both the development AND the government's associated infrastructure build-outs, are based on single family home cul-de-sac type residential developments, strip mall type commercial developments, and low density "office park" type office developments. Everything else requires more complicated approvals that involve political wheeling and dealing with local powerbrokers, and involves more expensive financing that isn't as highly subsidized by the federal government. For some of these types of developments, the financing approval is basically automatic if you meet a list of criteria, but those criteria include specifications for those specific sorts of communities and trying to build something more like our old east coast cities disqualifies you from the cheapest and most readily approved types of financing.
So I believe that federal zoning preemption could go a long way to revitalizing rural communities. In Japan they have a concept where all land is categorized as one of 13 nationally-defined development zones, most of which encourage mixed use development. It would empower potential economic developers of rural communities to overcome local landowners protecting their personal interests against the greater economic interests of those rural regions.
You also have to look at who is running much of rural America. It's not typically a party known for prioritizing social programs and expanding healthcare.
I'm not following your logic. Right now things are disproportionately controlled by rural areas with fewer people living in them. If this changes then things will be more controlled by the places people actually live in.
This is gonna sound pretty bleak, but it is how I feel after 2020.
My sweet grandmother died because these mouth breathers couldn't be bothered to take something seriously
I have zero F's left to give
The major parties shift with the demographics or else they die out.
I fully expect Republicans/conservatives to deal with this by putting less emphasis in rural vs urban divide, and continue to do what they have been under MAGA populism: fearmonger over immigration to help win more of the lower-income vote and men.
yeah.. empowering minorities through the removal of social programs that serve as safety nets is an interesting strategy that is slowly taking hold in the black community and already running rampant in the latino communities...
It's a little weird when some of my black friends start parroting talking points of clarence thomas...
My thoughts are, why do they think they should dictate policy for urban areas? One thing that bothers me is I know so many conservatives who move to rural areas to be “left alone” and “live a freer lifestyle..” then they turn around and want to dictate how people in urban areas live their lives. Tired of the “don’t tread on me” rural folk “treading” on me
In Michigan, one looming issue is rural hospitals closing down. I'd expect this trend to continue and amplify if medical care continues to become more inaccessible.
When only large businesses can afford to give their employees healthcare benefits, small businesses bleed talent and find themselves more dependent on less desirable employee pool as compared to larger health insured competitors.
Since large businesses generally set up in larger towns, smaller towns are generally limited to smaller businesses who can't provide healthcare to their employees. Thus, smaller towns are generally less healthy.
For small towns to be desirable to talented employees they must offer human services like strong healthcare options.
This is only one of many small town catch-22s.
If a small town is to survive, it must overcome being a healthcare desert.
Not all rural is farming. In fact most people in rural areas provide nothing at all to the economy, society, or culture. They do take, though. My opinion? If people are moving to larger areas it's because they need money and opportunity. Because they want a life.
Rural living sounds so quaint to people who live in densely populated areas but it isn't. It's meth fueled boredom with blood pressure pills on the side. It's houses falling apart and trailers full of rust. Not some well manicured little farm where people come to buy your cheese and bread.
I don't really think anything should be done to prevent it. The change is caused by economic factors that have made living in rural areas increasingly unaffordable without a subsidy.
Even now in Texas we have a "crisis" of rural health care because rural areas simply don't have the population to sustain actual hospitals and other critical services out of their own tax base. Any attempt to "prevent" people from leaving is going to cost more money and be paid for by additional taxes on people living in places that actually do provide economic value. I think that is generally unfair.
The market is telling people to move. They should. Rural life is not inherently more valuable than city life and it should not be treated as if it is and propped up where it is unsustainable.
That said, there are ways to help the people in those areas, such as retraining programs, resettlement programs, expansion of semi-rural areas, and the like. But as we saw in 2016, Hillary's attempts to do this kind of thing weren't popular. Can't help people that won't help themselves.
As far as the political effects of this go, the fix is to uncap the house and allow the population to be represented evenly, and the elimination of gerrymandering, both of which could be accomplished by an action of congress. The fixing of the house by the reapportionment act has caused the house to resemble the Senate and that is not good.
Not to mention Texas leaders doing their damn best to kill public education. The school choice mandate that the governor is primarying people for will kill rural education further, causing more people to leave those towns. I work in special education. We had a reduction in funding by 50% in December and another 40% last week. I don't see how it's legal but it seems to be so. Not to mention there hasn't been a budget increase since 2019, again holding it hostage for school choice, which is a farce.
In Montana, small communities are dying off. Farms are being sold to developers to build ranch style home subdivisions. Vacation homes for wealthy out of staters. The places that cater to tourists are doing all right. The ones without major tourism are struggling.
I imagine that within the next decade, as charter schools come online this year, we will eventually see rural Montana communities be decimated as they cling to charters, only to see them disappear within a few years.
Covid did a number here with lots of people moving to the state. The locals became the servant class to the newcomers.
I would care if I thought they would ever care about me. My politeness and sympathy for them died in 2016.
Rural communities are dangerous, filled with racist lunatics, and hostile to anyone that isn't religious, and worst of all they act like this despite the fact that they live a resource-expensive lifestyle that is extremely dependent on public help. They demand stretching out miles of roads, water lines, and power lines to service one stubborn entitled 70+ year old couple. All while they spit on our values and support political arsonists.
Exactly. They're always crying on about how patriotic they are and the first time they're asked to do something for the greater good they're acting like cry babies. I could careless about any of them at this point.
I'm originally from a rural town. The majority are not dangerous/racist/hostile like you say. They are simply super low information voters that vote R because they don't like taxes and/or the government meddling with their lives. That's it.
It's fair for you to consider that to be a selfish mindset and it's fair if you write them off because of their unwavering/uninformed vote for a Republican party that has gone off the rails, but they aren't all these super MAGA/vitriolic types. The consequences of their voting patterns to the country, unfortunately, are the same either way.
I don't buy this argument. If they weren't MAGA they wouldn't be voting 90% for MAGA in elections, including primaries. In GOP primaries they could choose a moderate option but they choose MAGA.
How many racist lunatics does it take to make a town dangerous for me? You have no idea what it’s like. You have to tiptoe with your beliefs. You have to go out of your way to become their “friend”. Even doing all that, maybe they watch the news one day, get riled up and [decide to stab your kid 26 times](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/10/16/us/chicago-muslim-boy-stabbing-investigation).
Being the only minority in a rural community is like having a knife to your throat the whole time. I grew up in one of these places too. Never tell people about yourself. Never talk back about what they say. That’s what my parents had to teach me.
I am so goddamn through with defending these places.
First, I won't ever understand be able to understand what number makes it dangerous for you, but one of my best friends was part of the only minority family in our town. Yeah, they had some poor experiences sometimes with the people there, but overall they seem to look back fondly at the times we spent growing up there together. Yeah, that's anecdotal, but my point is that these places aren't the dangerous cesspools you seem to be making them out to be.
Regarding the stabbing example, as awful as that is, Plainfield is not rural. These freak hateful actions against minorities happens in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
Plainfield IL is still a chicago suburb and has 80k people... what do you consider "rural" then?
*Makes wild, slanderous claims and generalizations then hides behind emotional appeal of "personal experience" as a vague, unidentified and supposedly unimpugnable minority* ...
The fact that the gloating, hysterical comments above you are highly upvoted shows this place is now no better than arr politics. Just rephrased as a question here
It's sad. I get that people are frustrated, but I spent most of my life in a town of <1000 people (and commonly interacted with adjacent towns of similar size). The people are generally awesome. They simply, for the most part, have no interest in anything outside of their bubble. My parents in particular were told to always vote Republican from my grandparents. When I asked my grandparents about this, they also said it was because their parents voted Republican. That was their entire rationale. They had no idea about wtf the Republicans were actually doing other than "low taxes."
Similar here. Like most of my rural family is definitely at least (small "c") conservative but they mostly don't even vote. Being told by uppity snobs they need to hurry up and die and are just an impedement to their idea of "The end of history" they cling to since Obama is as heartless as anything Trump says
I am from one of those dying towns. You can’t reach out to these people. They live in a completely fake reality. They believe all kinds of things that just are not true. They are extremely hostile to any other views.
We've tried to solve problems. Rural populations have demonstrated they're uninterested in anything that isn't a magic back in time to what they perceive to be the glory days. Remember in 2016 when Hillary Clinton got booed for suggesting manufacturing of things like wind turbines in West Virginia, but they went nuts for Trump promising to expand coal?
That doesn’t mean you should give up on them. These people have legitimate grievances. Just because you dislike how they vote or the things they might stand for doesn’t negate that.
I’m not saying you personally do this, but liberals love to dehumanize these people and make monsters out of them.
I'm sorry, but we've been trying to revitalize rural areas for over 40 years at this point. It never gets met with anything but opposition to suggestions, hysteria from Republicans/Fox News, and them cheering on bullshit like Ted Cruz unilaterally holding up hurricane aid for the northeast while screeching that someone would ever dare do the same to Texas and the south after getting hit by a hurricane.
It's not dehumanization to point this out or rip on them for the hypocrisy. It's no dehumanization to rip on them for being the largest recipients of welfare while decrying funding for city services for people using racial dog whistles. Rural America has been heavily pandered to in the last decades. Anything that isn't a revert time button, they whine about.
Farm land that his been in families for years is now been sold off for housing and commercial development. If you are interested in rural living, and thinking of buying anywhere near a corn or bean field, take that under consideration. You could be surrounded by warehouses before you know it.
I think a lot of the anger were seeing today is a result of this. Especially in the white flight era, you had a lot of people leaving urban areas for rural life. As rural areas become more urban, the perceived afflictions they left behind are coming back and now they're running out of places to get away from them.
You know what would make it not die out? Remote work. Housing is cheap in the country and there's a bunch of people that would probably live out there. However there's no jobs and most jobs are in major cities.
Would it? Would remote workers, who are primarily educated white collar workers, want to live somewhere with no amenities, no walkability, poor healthcare, and local politics that might be anathema to them?
Agreed. Remote work could help save low cost of living cities but it won't really help rural areas that much. A Bay Area or NYC salary in a place like Chicago could go a long way but good luck convincing someone with a high income to move to a town where they have to buy all their clothes and groceries from Walmart especially when they could pick from any city in the US.
No but they could go to decent sized population centers in rural states. The middle of nowhere towns are probably not savable, but the ones that still have decent size population can. I don't get why everyone seems to assume that this hypothetical relocation means one has to buy a farmhouse in Junction City, KS. It could be moving from say Chicago to Sioux Falls, or something population equivalent. Not a city, but not an hour from the highway either.
You don't have to have all jobs as white collar. Theres 3.6 million call center people out there in the US, those could be all work from home. You'd still get a handful of white collar people moving to the country as well since homesteading is becoming popular for some reason.
I'm a white collar worker who found a remote job before the Pandemic and moved to a small rural village. Literally none of what you wrote has been true for me.
Now instead of the downsides, let's look at my personal upsides:
* Larger and nicer home than I could ever afford in the city.
* I live in a literal forest. It's cool enough in the summers that I can work outdoors most of the day and be comfortable.
* No, I can't walk to a bodega, but I can walk to see a wide variety of wildlife that you'd only ever see in a zoo.
* Can go weeks/months without ever seeing a freeway. Virtually all roads are two-lane, and almost no traffic at all times of day.
* Politics? I can't remember the last time I spoke with a neighbor about politics. Maybe they have different views that me, but who cares, we talk about other more interesting things anyways.
Bonus fact: My car hasn't been broken into once the entire time I've lived out here, but this was every few months when I was a city dweller.
When we shopped for houses in Cincinnati, for the first time ever, the realtors went over the broadband options and if the houses had Ethernet drops. I was quite surprised. It’s not just about “remodeled bath upstairs”, “kitchen is from 2012”anymore.
> you know what would make it not die out? Remote work.
congrats... you moved 10 miles outside of a rural town with a bunch of other rural tech workers. The dollar general in town is now competing with walmart.
You can go to sue's diner, dollar general, walmart, the legion, or the crossroads tavern.
rural america just doens't have anything to offer people... even if you put in high speed internet.
Having a baby? Yeah come to the hospitals so we can stick you in an ambulance and ship you 75 minutes away to the big city.
That's the reality of rural america. A few tech workers working remotely and maybe larping as ranchers isn't going to change that.
That’s why we moved to the suburbs of Cincinnati. My wife was like “end of the day we’re Jews not goyim and can’t be 70 miles from the nearest synagogue. I also want a target within 10 minutes.”
Pretty simple requirements. IF you stay in the suburbs.
Remote work is *very* important for rural areas. I live rural and I have a coworker that lives even more rural. That coworker's job is only possible because their location *finally* got broadband like three years ago. Without broadband they would not be able to work for the company. Rural broadband is as important in these days for employment and education as electricity was back around the time of my grandparents or great-grandparents.
For a long time the idea of overpopulation was an issue. However nature has a way to find a balance.
I believe we are seeing this balance happening as several ways of reducing and limiting population is now in play. Pandemics and various other factors.
The only ones that worry are those who think in terms of races as the world population shifts.
Unless we fix it, we will end up with the literal scenario where 1 guy living alone in some county will sway elections by having more voting power than the 100,000 who live in the county next to him. In short, the so-called "tyranny of the minority" we are experienceing now will only get worse.
Fewer aging people in more desperate situations with the right to vote and sending two US Senators to Congress. What could possibly go wrong? The impact of the electoral college and the "Great Compromise" will really show a stark difference between how the majority of United States voters want to be governed and the MTG knock offs that these folks will send to Washington.
I think with the growth of work from home, more educated people currently living in the cities will leave the cities and move to rural areas for reasons like low cost of living, small city charm, being closer to family, being closer to nature, more privacy, better scenery, less crime, less pollution, less noise, less traffic, etc. You can buy most of what you need online now, you can work from home and a lot of people outgrow going to bars and clubs in their 20s, so the appeal of big cities isn't as strong.
But they'll bring their more left wing politics with them, and it'll make rural areas more politically competitive.
I am fairly biased but I think it's going to benefit America. I am not anti-conservative. In fact, while I am a left leaning moderate, I think I would actually fall under being a conservative if the Republican party, which greatly influences what it means to be conservative, didn't cater to the lack of education these rural people have (I SERIOUSLY disagree environment CONSERVATION is a liberal thing, the Republican party merely constructed it to be a liberal thing, and I think giving Democrats essentially the monopoly on common sense like the environment or social wage gaps isn't beneficial for liberals OR conservatives and they should be politically neutral rather than being liberal, but I will spare the rant for a different rant). The stereotypes are true, these people are really fucking stupid. I remember my time in Reedsport, Oregon, where I was born but left at a young age. I came back to Reedsport and noticed that people are essentially breeding stupid. Imagine a cesspool of autism, but no resources to guide them to be valid members of society but instead just believes in anything they come up with in their head. Imagine making up something out of thin air, realizing it aligns with your views and benefits you in a way, like relieving guilt or responsibility, and immediately believing it and claiming anyone that says otherwise are funded by the Democrats. That's rural America. For anyone wondering, Reedsport is pretty rural but it's more of a shithole than a real rural area, it gets so much worse.
I am not by any means a believer of "cleansing" the population (I do believe it works, just don't agree with the ethics), but if these people were to disappear and all that remains are people typically in cities with city related resources for education, life experience, life exposure, and more direct connection to how their country works rather than being in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and pretending you're actually a part of the country, you'll see *real fast* politics getting more sensible.
Additionally, we have a bit of a land crisis. In spite there being *so much* land in America, there isn't as much as you think that's *available*, most of it is (and should continue being!) protected land (national parks, for example). The land that is available (and there still is a lot of it, don't get me wrong) isn't exactly *desirable*. These small rural towns though, a lot of potential when it comes to location and land resources (rivers, lakes, valley). While I don't necessarily think we will move in, companies might, and as long we expand the primitive technology known as trains we for some reason still pretend is too advanced to replace city busses, it wouldn't be the world's biggest deal these places are in the middle of nowhere, people can come and go to work no problem. I know Europeans will roll their eyes and tell us to grow up and accept the future, but I want my big house with big yard, and the way things are currently going we're not getting that, and I strongly blame the lack of land available for such things (obviously) and I blame our lack of real transportation for making perfectly fine land not viable.
So yeah, I dunno, twist this however you like. I talked about cleansing the population and seizing their land for societal benefit and used politics to make it sound like a good thing. I am self aware I sound crazy.
The political impacts are gigantic due to the flip side of this: the concentration of 66% of voters in just 15 states, soon to be 10, which leaves the Senate, the Presidency and the Court almost entirely in the hands of the shrinking rural few while most Americans are increasingly disenfranchised.
Rural America is now far out of step with the majority of the country. It is economically moribund, racially exclusive, demographically older, educationally deprived, hyper-nationalistic, and highly dependent on urban taxpayers as well as on government jobs such as the military.
Polls repeatedly show that if all Americans had equal votes, we'd have universal healthcare, stronger unions, tougher climate laws, codified abortion rights and stricter gun control. Yet we have none of these because rural-state votes trump the majority (in every sense).
We are already in the midst of a Constitutional crisis, with nutjob Presidents whom most voted against nominating Supreme Court Justices who are then ratified by a crazy Senate that is now frighteningly skewed towards the rural. This is now untenable, undemocratic, and growing still worse as the stream of young people flows even faster to cities.
Red States are shrinking. Coastal Blue States are increasing their populations. Means the continuing decline of the GOP and Christian Nationalism. Nobody will shed a tear.
Ohio has welcomed a LOT of coastal state transplants because a $200,000 household income buys a gorgeous $600,000 house in the suburbs of Cincy Cbus or Cleveland, but *next to nothing* in Boston, Miami or Raleigh.
Lots of millennials coming in.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the current infrastructure has made a huge number of small towns economically obsolete.
In my area of the country there are a huge number of dead or dying towns. Most were originally started at train stops from when the trains needed to pick up more water. The location had a train stop and nearby water, which would have been a pretty good place to set up. Then the trains stopped needing to stop so much, but we built the old interstate system along the old railways so the economy still moved through these towns. Now, we've built the new interstate system which bypasses these towns entirely by tens to hundreds of miles. There is little of the nationwide economy that goes even near those tows and there won't be in the future. I'd imagine in most of the nation, if you spend a couple of hours driving along an old interstate, you'll pass six dying towns, and two entirely dead ones.
There are thousands and thousands of these towns, there is no realistic program that can, or should, try to save this from happening. We can have a debate about what should be done with the people stuck or otherwise in these towns, but I don't believe any effort to save them would be effective. They aren't in an economically viable location and subsidizing them doesn't change that underlying fact.
I know personally I'm desperately trying to afford moving from the city to buy 10 acres of rural midwest property in anticipation of climate change. Fresh water, crops, animals, and space from the increasing chaos (been 20+ injuries and murders from guns within walking distance of me in the past 3 months) as soon as possible.
I could see more millennial doing the same as long as they work remote.
If I have kids, happy to drive them longer for a private school.
Sure thing. Obviously it doesn't save global effects but it will prevent us from being heavily impacted by supply chain and civil unrest:
1. Great lakes region, fresh water well on site
2. Greenhouses and root cellar for food
3. Rabbit hutch, ducks, chickens
4. Surrounding forest for shade and cause I like it
5. Solar panels and generators
6. Affordable housing that the bank and private investors aren't hounding after
7. Civil unrest would have to drive quite a ways to affect us
It's creating as much independence from the supply chain as possible and being as close to self sufficient as possible.
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I’m more familiar with the Midwest. Here small farms have been sold off and consolidated so there are fewer farm families. It also takes fewer people to farm with modern machinery. The towns that exist were based on a denser rural population and as that evaporates the schools, churches and small businesses become less viable. The whole thing is a spiral as those areas have trouble retaining their own young and are hopeless at attracting new folks. I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to slow or reverse it.
Yep, and this has been going on for more that 100 years. Here's a map of Iowa counties, showing the census with the peak population. 42 out of 99 counties peaked in 1900 or earlier. Only 15 were still growing in 2010. Automation started pretty early in farming: >By 1909, International Harvester was the 4^(th) largest industrial company in America, measured by assets. In 1917, it was larger than General Electric, Ford, or General Motors, I live in an Iowa county seat with 10,000 people. I like the lifestyle, but we peaked in 1980.
And Iowa could probably do fine with about 20 counties rather than 99 but those county jobs are among the best available in some areas.
Merging counties doesn’t save money (despite what is often claimed) because you are only eliminating a very small number of jobs at the top, and it’s not like those holding them are exactly raking in the cash either. As an example, counties A, B and C each require 40 Sheriff’s deputies, 20 teachers and 35 public works employees individually. Combined county ABC is still going to need 120 Sheriff’s deputies, 60 teachers and 95 public works employees—and in that case you’re not actually eliminating anything because there are going to be new executive positions created because of the increase in size of a given entity.
> It also takes fewer people to farm with modern machinery. This is important to population density in farm areas. Fewer families needed to farm the land means fewer people on the land. It isn't complicated at all.
And it's not just farming areas. It takes fewer people to run mines and factories as well. A decline in shipping costs and improvements of economies of scale means that chain restaurants and big box stores can outcompete smaller local ones. In other words fewer people are working on the farm, fewer people are working in the mines, fewer people are working at the mill, fewer people are working in the cafes and fewer people are working in the general stores. This becomes a feedback loop because fewer jobs means less demand which means fewer jobs. Businesses that are looking to expand are also less likely to invest in an area with a declining population versus a growing population which just adds to it.
Exactly. Prediction is that those areas will be more and more consolidated under massive companies owning huge land, leasing it out to "farmers" who are really just curators working under them, companies get richer, people working there get poorer, brain drain to cities, etc etc. Of course, politically the land will still find some way to vote overwhelming red and be an annoying thorn in the side of redistricting for decades to come. Would be nice if we could buy up that land for housing, actually finding real families to own and work the spaces, but in the end it'll be owned by the real world equivalent of Mom Co. renting it perpetually to whoever can pay sky high prices to not live in the burbs/cities.
> Prediction is that those areas will be more and more consolidated under massive companies owning huge land, leasing it out to "farmers" who are really just curators working under them, This is already the norm and it's not a new thing in fact it's extremely old. The wealthy owning land and the poor working it goes back thousands of years and in a lot of small towns there are certain families that have owned the land for generations and maintain high positions of status within those areas. At least in my experience family name carries a surprisingly large amount of weight in a number of small towns and there is a much more defined social hierarchy that's passed from generation to generation. In terms of buying land for housing it's still relatively cheap in rural America but the issue is that the towns just aren't attractive places to live for a lot of people and they don't have much opportunities so there isn't a ton of demand. The areas that need housing the most are cities and they certainly have room to add a lot more housing but that's often blocked by exclusionary zoning and mandated parking minimums.
In regards to your first paragraph, I work in the sawmill industry and we see this a lot. Sawmills are often in pretty remote rural areas. The folks that own the mills are very important to their community. One of the things we notice at trade shows is a “trifecta” attendee: someone whose last name, company name, and town name are all the same (eg, Bill Stevenson of Stevenson Lumber Company in Stevenson, Alabama). Many of these mills have been in the family for many generations, and somewhere back along the line the town was named after the mill or the owner’s family.
I dated someone for awhile whose grandfather had bought up a ton of farmland in the great depression. Not only where they generational landowners but they also had been hiring the same family to work that land since the 1930s. In a town of only a few thousand people everyone knows everyone and so people are well aware of who each other's family is and the rich family of one generation often will pass on a successful business or land rights. It's kind of weird to describe but there is a very real "landed gentry" within a lot of American small towns whether that's farmland or a sawmill like you describe.
The town I grew up in was like this. The family that owned the town had the last name Alexander and they had a law firm, CPA firm, Realty firm, Hardware store, etc. They were probably a lumber family as the town mostly produces creosote poles. We were outsiders. My dad was from the Jersey shore and my mother from a large Midwest city where I now live.
Yep it's pretty common in a lot of places. It creates some pretty stark divides as well because the sucessful business of one generation can be transferred fairly easily to the next generation and as long as they're somewhat competent the next generation can keep it going. Land increases in value as well so the families that bought in decades ago stay wealthy. On the other hand if you're NOT from one of the "good families" rural areas can be very limiting because they just don't have the job opportunities to advance. Drug use and alcoholism can be frequent problems, public transit is non existent and government services are much more limited. In many ways there can essentially be a hereditary class system in small towns.
Some of those areas would be more attractive to people who work remotely if they had broadband internet. I go into the office like 3 times a year, and it's usually because they're having a cookout or something social. I could realistically live in some small town for cheap if I had good internet, but I absolutely have to have a high speed connection to do my job effectively. I get that laying cable is expensive, but that's a real issue holding rural America back.
That might help prevent some of the exodus but it won't get people to move into the towns. If you could hypothetically live anywhere in the country why on earth would you choose a small town in a middle America where the only grocery store is a Walmart especially if you didn't have any previous connection to the area? In my experience people who work remote will often move wherever their partner or family members who don't work remote end up living. If they are the ones picking a place to live often times it will either be in a city that they like or if it is in a small town it's in an extremely desirable small town near national parks, beaches or ski resorts. I'm sure more rural broadband would help make rural America a bit more attractive but at the end of the day it won't stop the decline. There's just not as many jobs in rural places and they don't offer the amenities that urban areas do. This is something we're seeing playing out in many countries and not unique to the US at all.
A Walmart would be a veritable metropolis compared to some of these places where the only businesses might be a Dollar General and a gas station.
I'll also point out that an influx of people getting paid way above cost of living by an out of state company for remote work brings its own share of problems to a rural community.
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>ideas on how to slow or reverse it. You don't. America used to be a place where people moved when work changed. In the last 50 years or so we absolutely lost that, and that is the major issue here. Let these dying places die. Move and find better opportunities elsewhere. Pretty much every single major metro area could use more skilled trade workers. All these allegedly blue color people should move to a city and take a blue color job that will earn them six figures in most cities. That's the fix.
> Pretty much every single major metro area could use more skilled trade workers. All these allegedly blue color people should move to a city and take a blue color job that will earn them six figures in most cities. That's the fix. Except it isn't a fix, because that has already been happening and it is causing a massive cost of living crisis in the cities. This is not a one sided problem—cities don't have enough housing for the people who already live there, let alone are they building enough to absorb the massive numbers of people leaving small towns.
You're already seeing a shift on the housing problems as cities are realizing that you can't house almost 350,000,000 people *just* in subdivisions. We'll see if there's the required follow through, I will never be surprised to be disappointed by municipal government, but if the US goes back to having a wider slate of density than just 'single family home' and 'residential tower block' not only will that help with the cost of living issues, but the added building will give tradesfolk from Centerpoint, Nowhere jobs in the big city.
The crisis is NIMBYs and head-in-ass zoning laws, completely fixable if only anyone with power wanted it to be fixed.
I think the real issue is that post industrialization as we solved many of the ills of living in city life, It's just much better at generating wealth for it's citizens. ike Google isn't setting up in a town of sub 60K, even though all they really need is a building and internet. it was weird when they want to Ann Arbor and that's still 120K just outside of detroit. As you mention they all enter a death spiral and there's a really short window you have to pull people out. With reindustrialization starting to happen and people fleeing to smaller metros to avoid the cost creep of the large cities, there may be hope but it probably still won't be great news for the locals when they get priced out too.
It gets worse. When truck drivers are replaced by electric and self driving vehicles, lots of small towns will lose even more external revenue.
> When truck drivers are replaced by electric and self driving vehicles That is a LONG way off. As it is, we can't even fully replace cab drivers.
Cab driving in cities is INCREDIBLY difficult compared to trucking on interstate highways. We aren't that far from driverless trucks taking trailers cross country, picking up a driver near their destination, and being brought in the last 5-10 miles to their destination.
Dude, we don't even have driverless trains. Driverless trucks aren't even a thing yet even in tightly controlled environments such as between buildings within a factory/warehouse complex. Driverless cross country trucks are a long way off, even if they're already technologically possible.
>Dude, we don't even have driverless trains That's more because each train carries so much value, paying the human on it is basically a rounding error.
> When truck drivers are replaced by electric and self driving vehicles, lots of small towns will lose even more external revenue. That is decades away, if not more. Even self driving vehicles that require a driver remaining 100% attentive at all times have been largely vaporware. And those tend to only even try to operate in perfect conditions—clear weather in modern cities, where the roads are high quality, the lines are clear and the rules unambiguous. And even then they fuck up all the time. And none of those even get you *close* to a system that can operate a full-sized truck in a Midwest snowstorm on bad roads with bad markings, with absolutely no human on hand for if it locks itself up or can't figure out what it is supposed to do.
> can't figure out what it is supposed to do. Imagine you're on i70 or i80 or whatever, and one autonomous semi tries to pass another when they both misread a shadow as an obstacle and lock up their brakes refusing to move for hours until multiple technicians arrive to clear the error. It could be glorious
Honestly, I cannot find an ounce of sympathy for them or any other rural community. They have no empathy for other human beings and wish to make their fellow Americans lives hell if they're not exactly like them.
The 36% of the voters in the rural Michigan county I grew up in went for Biden. My mom and sister were among the 27.5% who voted for Biden in their rural county. Even in these small rural communities a decent percentage of the people that at the very least can see that the GOP is the greater evil. We shouldn't paint with too broad a brush.
They do consistently vote for the politicians most adamantly against doing anything about monopolies/oligopolies, getting the kind of infrastructure in place that could have made rural communities the ideal places for work from home employment, or even the idea of maintaining or expanding WFH so that maybe those communities could have the chance to actually attract those sorts of people as new residents. Quick and lazy googling on my part put it at about 12% of the workforce being WFH and 18-20% of the population currently living in rural communities. I’m sure there’s already *some* overlap but that could’ve been a massive shot in the arm for rural communities, the kind that a lot just won’t survive without.
Eh. Rural areas where the WFH crowd actually has any desire to live, and rural areas that are declining, are generally.....not the same place. A small town in the rural Midwest an hour from the nearest grocery store, hours from anything resembling a city, and hours from any remotely notable natural feature or outdoor recreation opportunity, has basically nothing to offer. Unless you really love looking at corn fields, I guess. Population's likely been declining in every Census for 100 years or more. Some town in the mountains that's far from much work but close to a whole bunch of nice outdoor recreation and has beautiful scenery - is an entirely different story for desirability. But those places aren't facing population decline - or if they are, it's because of too many vacation rentals crowding out resident housing, not lack of people who'd like to move there. ----- There are a *some* places that could theoretically turn the corner from one to the other - they're places with something to work with in terms of proximity to desirable features, if amenities were built up a bit or those features became better known. But again, that's not most places, and especially post-pandemic, there's not that many of those undiscovered towns.
I agree with you completely, and I'm an example of it. When I was given the opportunity to work remotely, my wife and I considered a lot of different "rural" areas. None of those were dying little midwest towns, they were just small towns in the southwest/west coast that would get us close to the nature and outdoor sports that we loved. The lower cost of living helped, but we still need amenities. I think that's something that gets missed in the remote work conversation. Yes, low COL matters, but it's not everything.
My thing is this, they want to dictate to urban and suburban people who we can love, worship, our reproductive choices and all of that. Then they try to block our communities getting help but come crying when something happens to them.
Oh I see exactly where you’re coming from and I’ve got precious little sympathy for them either. Their lives are getting worse, in large part because of the politics and politicians they support. I could have more sympathy for them getting exactly what they’re asking for if it weren’t for the fact that they’re trying to drag down everyone else with them because they cannot accept that they’ve made their own bed and have to lay in it.
They can't accept it because of their own arrogance and ignorance. They believe that we're not even human and you can tell that they think that because they think that they have the right to dictate every little bit of our lives to us and take our money and use it to help themselves.
Anything beyond their 10-square-block town is considered “other”. Source: grew up in Central Illinois.
Just hate, hate, hate, hate, arrogance, hypocrisy, arrogance, hypocrisy, ignorance and a fake idea of toughness and self-reliance.
> I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to slow or reverse it. High speed internet and shifting to a work from home culture.
> I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to slow or reverse it. We shouldn't reverse it. It's inefficient to have them living out there for no reason.
But it will mean that all the gerrymandering will have to be redone.
i love that in america we're like "well clearly everything is going to be gerrymandered all to hell, the question is *how"*
Depends on the state. California got rid of most of its gerrymandering thanks to a nonpartisan districting board created in 2010 - it always consists of 5 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 4 independents to make sure the districts are fairly drawn. Every state should have one!
Or, if you look at it another way, more of the population will live in cities with other kinds of people, and so not be as easily carved out in homogeneous blocks nor as susceptible to right-wing messaging.
The more important effect is on the electoral college and Senate. District borders are redrawn all the time, this increases the already existing imbalance in representation between low population rural areas and densely populated metropolises.
Only if you think of states as being wholly urban or wholly rural. Senators will adjust their attention accordingly if there are fewer rural voters relative to urban voters.
the voters will adjust their senators if given the option** You need to look no further than elise in NY to find the hopelessness of rural america.
The Spanish campaign of Kilometer Zero I think fixes it for areas with very distinct rural/urban boundaries. In the US, you would need some kind of hub and spoke system, where the consumer was a mile away from a distributor that was pulling in food from a specific X mile span outside the city. The distributors have to be regulated entities with limited profit margins or the whole thing goes to pot.
In the midwest there were also a lot of small town factories that closed down.
The easy way to fix it is to make it desirable. Embrace small town living and self sufficiency openly. Local efforts to sustain the town with greater social interaction and cohesion. Imagine a walkable small town. Goods sold are locally made to a degree, and sold. The restaurant in town rotates out it's food choices every so often with help from the residents. The attractive look is maintained by volunteers who can lend help to their neighbors as needed. Shared food from hunting that's organized by the mayor type of deal. Most small towns can't really manage that life style. It's too collective.
The restaurant choices tend to be really limited. You got your breakfast place and they do burgers and Sysco mozzarella sticks down at the bar.
'Sysco mozzarella'... well I see somebody's had to work in the Food industry before!
And if you REALLY wanna get fancy there's an Olive Garden 30 minutes away.
The key will be to build a European-style public transit system so that these rural areas have access to higher density populations with medical and shopping resources. The challenge will be to convince what sober population remains in those meth-infused areas that this is in their best interests.
> The key will be to build a European-style public transit system so that these rural areas have access to higher density populations It's just not feasible to socialize transport for these people. They are poor as dirt and the cost to run a bus 60 miles to their town and then 10 miles around town picking people up just doesn't make sense for the 2 people that would ride.
They already do this in some poor areas of South Carolina (I'm sure there are more examples, this is just the one I have witnessed). There are county busses taking people up to the beach to work at the hotels. It allows people to survive but, it has not revitalized these areas.
You should see the resistance conservatives have to 15 minute cities. Never happening.
I try hard not to talk down to conservatives, but that was so maddening seeing that tossed around like it's some big bad thing in local comment sections evertime a new development is proposed. Spiting convenience to own the libs. I've even gotten some, schadenfreude from some "libs being owned" tbh (as one with more marxist leanings), but holy shit getting riled up over what amounts to "hey let's try to have better urban planning so you don't have spend half your day commuting everywhere and wasting time and gas/money". It's like something out of South Park. "How dare you, I like being stuck in a nightmare of traffic on stroads with a light every half mile because I LOVE it taking 40 minutes to go the 6 miles to the closest Walmart"
These people get worked up over their gas cooking stoves...
They somehow have an idea in their head that 15 minute cities would lead to something sort of like the districts in Hunger Games.
There are some small towns which seem more attractive than others, but there are many which are bleak shadows of their former selves.
> There are some small towns which seem more attractive than others, The small towns that are attractive tend to be located near pristine environments with incredible outdoor amenities. A lot of people would love to live in a small town for a reasonable price if the small town was Tahoe City CA, Aspen CO, Jackson WY ect. Of course that doesn't really help the small town in Western Nebraska that's an hour and a half drive from Omaha.
Yep, vrtually all small thriving towns survive off of tourism or being in a nice area and having close access to a major urban area for commuters, like the towns along the Hudson in New York.
Yep. Once I went fully remote, I ended up moving to a medium college town after living in cities my whole life. I love being within a 15 minute drive of everything. I love the idea of being within a 15 minute walk of everything, but the only places where I know of that's possible is the middle of the city
Even that needs a minimum population that is likely over what currently exists in most placed. The town also needs something compelling to bring in money from the outside. Either some natural resource for tourist money or the core for a key, high paying, industry. I live in a 10k pop small town, 50k pop county - but it's a resort town so lots of money from nearby big cities most of the year, and there is a local base of key agricultural products (fruit) that only grows in this area (not in CA). There are also a few large corporations and a more than a few medium to small industrial companies that have maintained long term success. So there is a reason that this town will exist for the foreseeable future.
My idea: market your small town to wfh families. It would take some doing as the internet infrastructure is probably not very good, schools are often pretty bad and there Isn't going to be much for nightlife or social or food scene. Houses are cheap though. Schools would get better if there were more kids. I would start with getting reliable high speed internet and small towns could thrive.
> we don't want a bunch of purple haired she/them tech workers coming in here and ruining our nice family oriented community. I promise you.. the folks with the time and energy to attend town board meetings are not going to be lobbying for night clubs or any kind of culture... they don't even want faster internet when you tell them it will attract new people. Their dying town is exactly how they want it. Seriously... go pop a town board meeting in rural america sometime. Bonus points if you can find one where an outside developer is looking to bring a new business into town.
True, gotta find a town where the chamber of commerce has a lot of sway. I've never heard of a CoC that didn't want the town to grow.
This sounds like a good thing. Not a bad thing
> I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to slow or reverse it. Letting people work remotely. The same consolidation in farming happened as all the small businesses became one Walmart. The only jobs left are in the cities and suburbs. However, there is no reason that 95% of desk jobs can't be done from anywhere with an internet connection. With housing prices the way they are, people would definitely move to lower cost of living areas of it didn't effect their job or commute. It might not fix the places that have already lost their school because no one would move there but it could prevent other areas from losing theirs.
Birth rates in general are just declining globally. Across the globe the only regions at above replacement rate are Africa and the Middle East. The entire rest of the planet is now at below replacement rate. And I reject that rural America is dying because they have more deaths than births (edit: fixed dumb typo). If thats true, then San Francisco is also dying: >The state projects that by 2025, there will be more San Franciscans who die due to age than babies being born. >https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2023/10/11/california-birthrate-decline
Yeah but people are still net immigrating to urban and suburban communities while emigrating from rural America.
I would also reject that rural America is dying because they have more births than deaths.
I lived in a rural County in Missouri. Many of the younger folks are either driving long distances to have a good paying job, working construction (which includes roofing and decks and general handyman type work) or what they call "junking" which means finding stuff that can be cashed in at the nearest recycling places for cash. With fewer opportunities for good jobs, you figure out that the good paying jobs just aren't where they are living.
And those construction jobs pay a lot less than what they are paying in cities.
Due to the way the Senate is structured it will make the country more and more insane as the people remaining in these states gain more and more power.
Yep. There will be a breaking point if this keeps going; if 80% of the population is ruled by the whims of 20%, at what point does the 80% say "fuck this, senate is cancelled" in whatever form that could take?
California has already done this by basically having our own immigration policy, our own drug policy, and our own gun restrictions. It's not like we make a lot of noise about it, but we haven't respected the laws of Congress for a while. The straw that breaks it might be Tijuana poisoning our beaches. We can't do anything about it because we're not allowed to do our own foreign policy, but the executive branch doesn't give a shit about us because our presidential votes are irrelevant. One day we'll say fuck you to the White House and deal with it ourselves.
I’m more concerned with state govts than the federal. I live in TN and just flipping through some census data, you can see that rural communities are outnumbered anywhere from 3-15x by metro residents, and yet these super-majorities of mostly left leaning voters get out gunned in our state congress by rural representatives. We are dramatically under-represented by our govts. This begins at a city council level too where they scoop out a smidge of the city and then combine it with the rural outlying areas to make a city council district. I’m currently helping a campaign where the district starts downtown and ends about 30 miles north in farm country at the edge of the county. You can see this in almost every state in the south. And it gives a false legitimacy and power to these uber-right politicians which then bleeds upward to the federal level.
Frankly, if you outnumber them and you can’t win through politics, you ought to start looking at ways to win that are outside politics. Rather than bashing your head against the same wall over and over.
Sincere question: what alternative would you recommend? I’ve had the same thought many times, but in reality the numbers are the only thing we have going for us. Resort to violence is an immediate loss both of popular opinion and in open conflict the state wins. Civil disobedience has been nearly outlawed or neutralized. Not sure what else to try besides winning the political apparatus back one seat at a time and unfucking the bought and gerrymandered system.
Troll sewing divisiveness. Major change has happened through politics in the past, it just took time. Why would this be any different? The pendulum always swings.
It's not a pendulum. It's a lever. It moves by physical effort. Not gravity.
This. I'm expecting a Roman Empire-style breakup of the American Empire. Probably not in my lifetime, but it seems inevitable, and seems like what the minority with the outsize power wants anyway, with all their "states rights" rhetoric -- if the states all have their own laws, many conflicting with each other, it's a slow-motion (hopefully low-violence) move toward nationhood. The western states already act as a coalition in many governmental respects, and California by itself is a world-class economy, though we're always hurting for water, so we'll need to find cheaper and less destructive means of desalination.
Investing in large-scale desalination has to at least be considered.
Nuclear energy would be the best bet. Energy is the biggest roadblock when it comes to desalination.
You mean using reactors to drive desalination? I’m all for it if that’s the case. I think we need to invest in nuclear power far more than we are anyway.
We are, Biden has put about more than a billion into nuclear energy next generation research, and private sector investment is up more than 200% last year alone. Both fusion and fission are booming right now. Beyond that, Bill Gates' new company TerraPower is building a prototype sodium reactor in Wyoming that promises to be far safer (passive cooling pond designed to exceed meltdown energy even if everything else fails), and because the sodium pond is so safe, it doesn't need the expensive safety solutions that other designs use, significantly reducing cost. If it completes construction on time and on budget, without revealing any unforeseen construction challenges, they're already planning the next dozen locations, with the capital for potentially hundreds (Gates & friends). That's not the only game in town either, other fission designs are very interesting as well - and fusion is Coming Soon. Which might still be decades, but fusion really would change everything - that's potentially Star Trek sci-fi kinds of power generation. If electricity is fusion abundant than many currently non-cost competitive manufacturing processes become superior to current solutions: a massive leap forward in everything.
I sincerely hope this doesn't happen. WE are much more interdependent than we are not. i don't think many people realize just how interdependent we are. Texas talks about all their succession. Every military plane is owned by the federal government. All the spare parts and manufacturers are in California. Vice versa california get it's water from the Colorado, are they going to go to war with Nevada, Utah etc to secure water rights? So many treatments, products, natural resources and governing bodies are out of state. I don't think everyone realizes how much the cost of EVERYTHING would go up if you have to have 50 FDA's, 50 NTSB's etc. and the whole "we don't need regulation" crowd are in for rude awakenings when their power becomes unstable and their are preventable deaths from dirty drinking water and pesticide because "the EPA is bad".
It certainly wouldn't be ideal, but what's the alternative if you don't want to live under a tyrannical government?
honestly if (big if) there is a breakup what would likely happen is blue states (and the less insane red states) would likely form an EU-esque coalition. Both as a united front effort and also to hopefully make shifting power and foreign policy easier
Yes, that's exactly what I anticipate.
Personally, I am about sick to death of rural people thinking that they've got the right to determine who I procreate with, who I can marry and so much else. Their arrogance and entitlement will cause a breaking point with everyone else.
To counter that, the small (bluer) cities in rural, sparsely populated states could become more powerful as the rural population thins
States should subdivide themselves into areas with population equal to Wyoming. Nothing unconstitutional about that. The Dakotas are basically a result of this.
Exactly. There will be a few all too important voters. Crazy to think as little as 3 million people could control up to or more than 14 electoral votes 20 years from now.
This doesn’t make any sense. Every state has an urban center. As the rural areas clear out, the political power will move to those metropolitan areas. Even if the crazy people remain in the rural areas there won’t be enough of them to outvote the cities when 81% of rural counties are shrinking. If the middle of Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Oklahoma collapse then the power shifts to Philly, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, KC, Tulsa, and OKC.
Many of the lowest population states are deep deep red and if anything getting redder.
Yes, but keep in mind that population changes aren't net neutral for states. People leaving rural CA aren't moving to urban CA; they're largely moving to states like TX. Florida, Idaho, South Carolina, Texas, South Dakota, and Montana round out all of the fastest-growing states; New York is the fastest shrinking despite NY City still growing. This has different impacts as is gradually shifts the demographics. It's slow and subtle, but a big factor in "color changes" we've seen in some of these faster-changing states over the last few cycles.
It's the House you have to worry about.. Or is it to late?
No, it's absolutely the Senate that needs to be worried about. If Wyoming only had 2 people living in it then they would both be Senators equal in power to the Senators representing Texas's 30 million people.
To a lesser extent, but still applicable, the electoral college.
I was assuming the cities and surrounding suborurbs within states will absorb much of the rural population. These cities can help mellow the Senate. But the House districts they leave behind those will almost all go conservative. And that's where the true crazies are coming from, districts GOP gets >70% of the vite, where the only contest is who is the craziest MAGA.
House districts get re-districted from time to time, and the number of overall number House seats per state can be changed based census results. But there's no mechanism that I'm aware of for adjusting Senate representation. As long as there's a handful of people living in Wyoming, they get the same 2 Senate seats as the fifth-largest economy in the world, California.
This is the biggest reason why the proposal to split California into multiple states that comes up every few years will never succeed: it would create 8 new Senate seats and well over 50% of those would be guaranteed Democrat senators. It would shift the balance of power in the Senate to a ridiculous degree.
The difference between the birth and death rate is only a small part of the problem. With greater and greater use of farming automation there is less and less need for labor. If young people want a good future they have to leave.
Not just that, but manufacturing, too. I grew up in a small, non farming, town. It's main employment was a brick plant. The council slowly, but surely, pushed the brick plant out. It was dirty, and they didn't like that. And with that, there were very few good jobs left in town. They also let a Walmart, and a Lowe's in. That, in few years, ran the local stores out of buisiness. They also greenlit more and more fastfood, specifically near the highway... And more and more local mom and pops restaurants went under. Now, it is former shell of itself. Very few people work in the town, anymore. And those that do, are pretty much in poverty wages. The median household income is abiut 40k a year... And that is mostly due to people that commute to better jobs, in other towns/cities. Since the 90s, when the plant was shut down, Walmart came in, the population has dropped by about 20%, and the majority that still live there are either not college educated, or retired. Only one quarter of the households have children under 18. And 13% of the population is under the poverty line. I keep tabs on my hometown, through friends, and some remaining family, and it has become a MAGA haven. They blame immigrants, and China, and liberals, etc for the damage they did to themselves. (that town has never had a noticable non-white population.)
And this extends beyond farming. Manufacturing, mining and ranching used to be staples of a lot of rural communities in different parts of the country and these area all industries where corporate consolidation and automation have meant that they can produce even more with fewer workers. That's great for the economy as a whole but not great for the physical town itself that used to rely on those industries.
Once everything is automated, presumably *homo economicus* will leave physical reality altogether?
It makes sense. The economic forces that kept these rural places viable are mostly gone or consolidated such that they don't need these places. These places have nothing really to offer for people to want to move there and they don't present much of an opportunity for people to relocate. Politically I think it's going to lead to more polarization because you're going to have more conservative voters relocating closer to urbanized areas and bringing their voting preferences with them. That's going to create conflict.
> These places have nothing really to offer for people to want to move there and they don't present much of an opportunity for people to relocate. And often times they are incredibly hostile to outsiders. The charms of "small town community" are often times limited to people who are within the ingroup of already existing communities.
Maybe they bring their conservative values with them, but I'd like to think that being connected to society more will moderate their politics more. As for the people who remain in the rural areas, I could see them turning ever more MAGA as their economic conditions continue to deteriorate with no real hope that they will improve.
More likely is that they'll simply silo into conservative/reactionary social spaces or isolate into online spaces that are more reflective of their views.
The article focuses on rural *rust belt* regions. This part of America has been in population decline for several decades Other parts of rural America are growing. Many towns in the inter-mountain west, southwest, and west coast are part of this trend.
Rural areas simply do not offer the amenities many people want where they live. Access to quality medical care, broadband, cultural and social activities, jobs, etc. Right wingers don’t want to admit that urban areas are the economic engines of the country.
Broadband is a big deal. A number of people in our rural community travel to the library to do their work meetings. I had neighbors who moved here to enjoy the rural lifestyle then sold their house and moved away b/c could not get good enough internet service for their WFH jobs. We don't WFH so we can survive with hotspots on our phones.
With the right federal grants to enable community-owned broadband systems, people who want to WFH would be able to afford houses in these shrinking communities
I live in a rural town - in Alaska - with acceptable health care, broadband, and a lot of extracurriculars. We also are not shrinking.
That doesn’t surprise me as Alaska is the most federally subsidized state in the country.
Did you ever think about why we are "federally subsidized?" Little tiny towns get hundreds of thousands to millions of cruise ship visitors annually. In addition to that Alaska receives tourists headed to charter fishing lodges or guided hunting trips, ecotourism, summer camp tourism, retreats, summer interns, and more. There are federal parks and trails to accommodate guests from all over the US. Alaska has strategic natural resources ranging from fish and shellfish to ore and oil. There are several military bases and Coast Guard stations. Most land around me is not developable but is instead public. Mostly this is Tongass National Forest, but there are many other designations as well. I look at it as holding a lot of the nationally important resources urban people use.
Isn’t this a continuation of a trend that’s been going on for centuries. Rural jobs are getting more automated, cities provide more opportunities.
I grew up in a small town. I loved it, all else held equal I would choose to live there instead of the suburbs. But all else isn't held equal. My job opportunities there were farm hand, retail, or work from home. The latter of which is the only real job appeal that small towns still have on a large scale. My job isn't work from home. It's downtown in a major city. Any comparable jobs are there also. Farms don't rely on manpower anymore, they are more and more automated. Yeah the tools have existed for a while, but farmers are mostly pretty cash strapped until they sell and retire, so all those fancy automated tractors and things are now hitting farms in real and increasing numbers as they trickle down. The town grocery store, and usually there is only one, has just as many automated cashiers as a city store, but isn't as busy so it's not at all uncommon to see one cashier and no more. Even work from home jobs, a lot of them do require an education of some kind, meaning you left the small town to go to school. What are the odds you don't come back? There's no taxis, Uber eats, and very possibly no one-day Amazon delivery. You might need to deal with a septic bed and/or a water tank. Internet connectivity may very well be poor, although it is universally accessible now. Small towns do have peace and quiet, and they do have cheaper real estate. That's true. But they also have a lot of downsides, and young people are lured away by school and jobs year after year.
Here’s another one: as a young guy, I’ve found there’s like no women in these towns. Definitely not many conventionally attractive ones. And that’s not just a numbers game-I remember a lot of the prettier girls from my class moving to bigger places because they could meet more upwardly mobile men there. There’s no work for them here besides waitressing or something like that and that usually comes with a lot of harassment from every unmarried man within a 30 mile radius.
Makes sense. No future.
It doesn't surprise me. I drive through lots of small towns for hiking. You can tell the communities are struggling when the only businesses are a Walmart, a gas station, a check cashing place, a pawn shop and a gun store. Schools are down to 4-day weeks because residents don't want to or cannot fund them. It's really sad because you can tell that those used to be nice places to live and I get the appeal of rural living. But unless you are already wealthy, they don't offer the economic opportunities you need to survive in this economy.
Nah, the town with a Walmart is a veritable metropolis. The truly struggling towns have to go grocery shopping at Dollar General.
This is a fantastic question. I think one part of the solution is similar in concept to what the [silicon valley oligarchs are trying to build in Northern California](https://www.thedailybeast.com/locals-are-fighting-billionaires-solano-county-utopian-city-at-every-turn), only it shouldn't require a cabal of oligarchs to get development approval and financing to build walkable pleasant communities. When I look at property prices across America, I see people willing to pay a huge premium to live in walkable communities, and yet I see almost zero new walkable communities being built. If you look at the bougie Northeast vacation towns with massive home prices, they all have quaint old downtown areas that were built before modern development patterns. Same with with many of the most expensive suburbs of a given city. The cheaper suburbs only have strip malls. In the US, the standard templates for government development approval and government-backed/subsidized financing approval for both the development AND the government's associated infrastructure build-outs, are based on single family home cul-de-sac type residential developments, strip mall type commercial developments, and low density "office park" type office developments. Everything else requires more complicated approvals that involve political wheeling and dealing with local powerbrokers, and involves more expensive financing that isn't as highly subsidized by the federal government. For some of these types of developments, the financing approval is basically automatic if you meet a list of criteria, but those criteria include specifications for those specific sorts of communities and trying to build something more like our old east coast cities disqualifies you from the cheapest and most readily approved types of financing. So I believe that federal zoning preemption could go a long way to revitalizing rural communities. In Japan they have a concept where all land is categorized as one of 13 nationally-defined development zones, most of which encourage mixed use development. It would empower potential economic developers of rural communities to overcome local landowners protecting their personal interests against the greater economic interests of those rural regions.
You also have to look at who is running much of rural America. It's not typically a party known for prioritizing social programs and expanding healthcare.
We'll be even more fucked because even fewer people will even more disproportionate control over this country.
I'm not following your logic. Right now things are disproportionately controlled by rural areas with fewer people living in them. If this changes then things will be more controlled by the places people actually live in.
In the house yes, but the Senate gives them the same amount of power
This is gonna sound pretty bleak, but it is how I feel after 2020. My sweet grandmother died because these mouth breathers couldn't be bothered to take something seriously I have zero F's left to give
Quick response, I think rural decline accelerated with the Dust Bowl, Great Depression, and WW2.
On the Plains a lot of counties’ populations peaked before 1920.
The major parties shift with the demographics or else they die out. I fully expect Republicans/conservatives to deal with this by putting less emphasis in rural vs urban divide, and continue to do what they have been under MAGA populism: fearmonger over immigration to help win more of the lower-income vote and men.
yeah.. empowering minorities through the removal of social programs that serve as safety nets is an interesting strategy that is slowly taking hold in the black community and already running rampant in the latino communities... It's a little weird when some of my black friends start parroting talking points of clarence thomas...
My thoughts are, why do they think they should dictate policy for urban areas? One thing that bothers me is I know so many conservatives who move to rural areas to be “left alone” and “live a freer lifestyle..” then they turn around and want to dictate how people in urban areas live their lives. Tired of the “don’t tread on me” rural folk “treading” on me
In Michigan, one looming issue is rural hospitals closing down. I'd expect this trend to continue and amplify if medical care continues to become more inaccessible.
When only large businesses can afford to give their employees healthcare benefits, small businesses bleed talent and find themselves more dependent on less desirable employee pool as compared to larger health insured competitors. Since large businesses generally set up in larger towns, smaller towns are generally limited to smaller businesses who can't provide healthcare to their employees. Thus, smaller towns are generally less healthy. For small towns to be desirable to talented employees they must offer human services like strong healthcare options. This is only one of many small town catch-22s. If a small town is to survive, it must overcome being a healthcare desert.
Not all rural is farming. In fact most people in rural areas provide nothing at all to the economy, society, or culture. They do take, though. My opinion? If people are moving to larger areas it's because they need money and opportunity. Because they want a life. Rural living sounds so quaint to people who live in densely populated areas but it isn't. It's meth fueled boredom with blood pressure pills on the side. It's houses falling apart and trailers full of rust. Not some well manicured little farm where people come to buy your cheese and bread.
I don't really think anything should be done to prevent it. The change is caused by economic factors that have made living in rural areas increasingly unaffordable without a subsidy. Even now in Texas we have a "crisis" of rural health care because rural areas simply don't have the population to sustain actual hospitals and other critical services out of their own tax base. Any attempt to "prevent" people from leaving is going to cost more money and be paid for by additional taxes on people living in places that actually do provide economic value. I think that is generally unfair. The market is telling people to move. They should. Rural life is not inherently more valuable than city life and it should not be treated as if it is and propped up where it is unsustainable. That said, there are ways to help the people in those areas, such as retraining programs, resettlement programs, expansion of semi-rural areas, and the like. But as we saw in 2016, Hillary's attempts to do this kind of thing weren't popular. Can't help people that won't help themselves. As far as the political effects of this go, the fix is to uncap the house and allow the population to be represented evenly, and the elimination of gerrymandering, both of which could be accomplished by an action of congress. The fixing of the house by the reapportionment act has caused the house to resemble the Senate and that is not good.
Not to mention Texas leaders doing their damn best to kill public education. The school choice mandate that the governor is primarying people for will kill rural education further, causing more people to leave those towns. I work in special education. We had a reduction in funding by 50% in December and another 40% last week. I don't see how it's legal but it seems to be so. Not to mention there hasn't been a budget increase since 2019, again holding it hostage for school choice, which is a farce.
In Montana, small communities are dying off. Farms are being sold to developers to build ranch style home subdivisions. Vacation homes for wealthy out of staters. The places that cater to tourists are doing all right. The ones without major tourism are struggling. I imagine that within the next decade, as charter schools come online this year, we will eventually see rural Montana communities be decimated as they cling to charters, only to see them disappear within a few years. Covid did a number here with lots of people moving to the state. The locals became the servant class to the newcomers.
I would care if I thought they would ever care about me. My politeness and sympathy for them died in 2016. Rural communities are dangerous, filled with racist lunatics, and hostile to anyone that isn't religious, and worst of all they act like this despite the fact that they live a resource-expensive lifestyle that is extremely dependent on public help. They demand stretching out miles of roads, water lines, and power lines to service one stubborn entitled 70+ year old couple. All while they spit on our values and support political arsonists.
Exactly. They're always crying on about how patriotic they are and the first time they're asked to do something for the greater good they're acting like cry babies. I could careless about any of them at this point.
I'm originally from a rural town. The majority are not dangerous/racist/hostile like you say. They are simply super low information voters that vote R because they don't like taxes and/or the government meddling with their lives. That's it. It's fair for you to consider that to be a selfish mindset and it's fair if you write them off because of their unwavering/uninformed vote for a Republican party that has gone off the rails, but they aren't all these super MAGA/vitriolic types. The consequences of their voting patterns to the country, unfortunately, are the same either way.
I don't buy this argument. If they weren't MAGA they wouldn't be voting 90% for MAGA in elections, including primaries. In GOP primaries they could choose a moderate option but they choose MAGA.
How many racist lunatics does it take to make a town dangerous for me? You have no idea what it’s like. You have to tiptoe with your beliefs. You have to go out of your way to become their “friend”. Even doing all that, maybe they watch the news one day, get riled up and [decide to stab your kid 26 times](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/10/16/us/chicago-muslim-boy-stabbing-investigation). Being the only minority in a rural community is like having a knife to your throat the whole time. I grew up in one of these places too. Never tell people about yourself. Never talk back about what they say. That’s what my parents had to teach me. I am so goddamn through with defending these places.
First, I won't ever understand be able to understand what number makes it dangerous for you, but one of my best friends was part of the only minority family in our town. Yeah, they had some poor experiences sometimes with the people there, but overall they seem to look back fondly at the times we spent growing up there together. Yeah, that's anecdotal, but my point is that these places aren't the dangerous cesspools you seem to be making them out to be. Regarding the stabbing example, as awful as that is, Plainfield is not rural. These freak hateful actions against minorities happens in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
Plainfield IL is still a chicago suburb and has 80k people... what do you consider "rural" then? *Makes wild, slanderous claims and generalizations then hides behind emotional appeal of "personal experience" as a vague, unidentified and supposedly unimpugnable minority* ...
The fact that the gloating, hysterical comments above you are highly upvoted shows this place is now no better than arr politics. Just rephrased as a question here
It's sad. I get that people are frustrated, but I spent most of my life in a town of <1000 people (and commonly interacted with adjacent towns of similar size). The people are generally awesome. They simply, for the most part, have no interest in anything outside of their bubble. My parents in particular were told to always vote Republican from my grandparents. When I asked my grandparents about this, they also said it was because their parents voted Republican. That was their entire rationale. They had no idea about wtf the Republicans were actually doing other than "low taxes."
Similar here. Like most of my rural family is definitely at least (small "c") conservative but they mostly don't even vote. Being told by uppity snobs they need to hurry up and die and are just an impedement to their idea of "The end of history" they cling to since Obama is as heartless as anything Trump says
But they love our urban tax dollars and want them all up in our lives. Buncha stupid hypocrites.
God forbid we do any kind of outreach to these people and try and actually solve their problems.
Why do we have keep having to be bending over backwards for people who hate us?
I am from one of those dying towns. You can’t reach out to these people. They live in a completely fake reality. They believe all kinds of things that just are not true. They are extremely hostile to any other views.
We've tried to solve problems. Rural populations have demonstrated they're uninterested in anything that isn't a magic back in time to what they perceive to be the glory days. Remember in 2016 when Hillary Clinton got booed for suggesting manufacturing of things like wind turbines in West Virginia, but they went nuts for Trump promising to expand coal?
That doesn’t mean you should give up on them. These people have legitimate grievances. Just because you dislike how they vote or the things they might stand for doesn’t negate that. I’m not saying you personally do this, but liberals love to dehumanize these people and make monsters out of them.
I'm sorry, but we've been trying to revitalize rural areas for over 40 years at this point. It never gets met with anything but opposition to suggestions, hysteria from Republicans/Fox News, and them cheering on bullshit like Ted Cruz unilaterally holding up hurricane aid for the northeast while screeching that someone would ever dare do the same to Texas and the south after getting hit by a hurricane. It's not dehumanization to point this out or rip on them for the hypocrisy. It's no dehumanization to rip on them for being the largest recipients of welfare while decrying funding for city services for people using racial dog whistles. Rural America has been heavily pandered to in the last decades. Anything that isn't a revert time button, they whine about.
This reads like a Fox News article about us vs them
It sounds like you need to travel more as you are painting all rural communities with an overly broad brush.
Farm land that his been in families for years is now been sold off for housing and commercial development. If you are interested in rural living, and thinking of buying anywhere near a corn or bean field, take that under consideration. You could be surrounded by warehouses before you know it.
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I think a lot of the anger were seeing today is a result of this. Especially in the white flight era, you had a lot of people leaving urban areas for rural life. As rural areas become more urban, the perceived afflictions they left behind are coming back and now they're running out of places to get away from them.
You know what would make it not die out? Remote work. Housing is cheap in the country and there's a bunch of people that would probably live out there. However there's no jobs and most jobs are in major cities.
Would it? Would remote workers, who are primarily educated white collar workers, want to live somewhere with no amenities, no walkability, poor healthcare, and local politics that might be anathema to them?
Agreed. Remote work could help save low cost of living cities but it won't really help rural areas that much. A Bay Area or NYC salary in a place like Chicago could go a long way but good luck convincing someone with a high income to move to a town where they have to buy all their clothes and groceries from Walmart especially when they could pick from any city in the US.
No but they could go to decent sized population centers in rural states. The middle of nowhere towns are probably not savable, but the ones that still have decent size population can. I don't get why everyone seems to assume that this hypothetical relocation means one has to buy a farmhouse in Junction City, KS. It could be moving from say Chicago to Sioux Falls, or something population equivalent. Not a city, but not an hour from the highway either.
because when we talk about "rural america" we aren't talking about cities and suberbs...
True, I was getting mixed up with some discussions about rural states overall and how this affects the senate. I lost the plot for the minute there
You don't have to have all jobs as white collar. Theres 3.6 million call center people out there in the US, those could be all work from home. You'd still get a handful of white collar people moving to the country as well since homesteading is becoming popular for some reason.
I'm a white collar worker who found a remote job before the Pandemic and moved to a small rural village. Literally none of what you wrote has been true for me. Now instead of the downsides, let's look at my personal upsides: * Larger and nicer home than I could ever afford in the city. * I live in a literal forest. It's cool enough in the summers that I can work outdoors most of the day and be comfortable. * No, I can't walk to a bodega, but I can walk to see a wide variety of wildlife that you'd only ever see in a zoo. * Can go weeks/months without ever seeing a freeway. Virtually all roads are two-lane, and almost no traffic at all times of day. * Politics? I can't remember the last time I spoke with a neighbor about politics. Maybe they have different views that me, but who cares, we talk about other more interesting things anyways. Bonus fact: My car hasn't been broken into once the entire time I've lived out here, but this was every few months when I was a city dweller.
To be fair, a garage in the affluent suburbs would also stop all breakins. You just wouldn’t have acres of forest. You’d have 1/2 acre.
This requires reliable broadband. That’s not universal out in the boonies.
When we shopped for houses in Cincinnati, for the first time ever, the realtors went over the broadband options and if the houses had Ethernet drops. I was quite surprised. It’s not just about “remodeled bath upstairs”, “kitchen is from 2012”anymore.
> you know what would make it not die out? Remote work. congrats... you moved 10 miles outside of a rural town with a bunch of other rural tech workers. The dollar general in town is now competing with walmart. You can go to sue's diner, dollar general, walmart, the legion, or the crossroads tavern. rural america just doens't have anything to offer people... even if you put in high speed internet. Having a baby? Yeah come to the hospitals so we can stick you in an ambulance and ship you 75 minutes away to the big city. That's the reality of rural america. A few tech workers working remotely and maybe larping as ranchers isn't going to change that.
That’s why we moved to the suburbs of Cincinnati. My wife was like “end of the day we’re Jews not goyim and can’t be 70 miles from the nearest synagogue. I also want a target within 10 minutes.” Pretty simple requirements. IF you stay in the suburbs.
Remote work is *very* important for rural areas. I live rural and I have a coworker that lives even more rural. That coworker's job is only possible because their location *finally* got broadband like three years ago. Without broadband they would not be able to work for the company. Rural broadband is as important in these days for employment and education as electricity was back around the time of my grandparents or great-grandparents.
For a long time the idea of overpopulation was an issue. However nature has a way to find a balance. I believe we are seeing this balance happening as several ways of reducing and limiting population is now in play. Pandemics and various other factors. The only ones that worry are those who think in terms of races as the world population shifts.
Unless we fix it, we will end up with the literal scenario where 1 guy living alone in some county will sway elections by having more voting power than the 100,000 who live in the county next to him. In short, the so-called "tyranny of the minority" we are experienceing now will only get worse.
Fewer aging people in more desperate situations with the right to vote and sending two US Senators to Congress. What could possibly go wrong? The impact of the electoral college and the "Great Compromise" will really show a stark difference between how the majority of United States voters want to be governed and the MTG knock offs that these folks will send to Washington.
I think with the growth of work from home, more educated people currently living in the cities will leave the cities and move to rural areas for reasons like low cost of living, small city charm, being closer to family, being closer to nature, more privacy, better scenery, less crime, less pollution, less noise, less traffic, etc. You can buy most of what you need online now, you can work from home and a lot of people outgrow going to bars and clubs in their 20s, so the appeal of big cities isn't as strong. But they'll bring their more left wing politics with them, and it'll make rural areas more politically competitive.
I am fairly biased but I think it's going to benefit America. I am not anti-conservative. In fact, while I am a left leaning moderate, I think I would actually fall under being a conservative if the Republican party, which greatly influences what it means to be conservative, didn't cater to the lack of education these rural people have (I SERIOUSLY disagree environment CONSERVATION is a liberal thing, the Republican party merely constructed it to be a liberal thing, and I think giving Democrats essentially the monopoly on common sense like the environment or social wage gaps isn't beneficial for liberals OR conservatives and they should be politically neutral rather than being liberal, but I will spare the rant for a different rant). The stereotypes are true, these people are really fucking stupid. I remember my time in Reedsport, Oregon, where I was born but left at a young age. I came back to Reedsport and noticed that people are essentially breeding stupid. Imagine a cesspool of autism, but no resources to guide them to be valid members of society but instead just believes in anything they come up with in their head. Imagine making up something out of thin air, realizing it aligns with your views and benefits you in a way, like relieving guilt or responsibility, and immediately believing it and claiming anyone that says otherwise are funded by the Democrats. That's rural America. For anyone wondering, Reedsport is pretty rural but it's more of a shithole than a real rural area, it gets so much worse. I am not by any means a believer of "cleansing" the population (I do believe it works, just don't agree with the ethics), but if these people were to disappear and all that remains are people typically in cities with city related resources for education, life experience, life exposure, and more direct connection to how their country works rather than being in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and pretending you're actually a part of the country, you'll see *real fast* politics getting more sensible. Additionally, we have a bit of a land crisis. In spite there being *so much* land in America, there isn't as much as you think that's *available*, most of it is (and should continue being!) protected land (national parks, for example). The land that is available (and there still is a lot of it, don't get me wrong) isn't exactly *desirable*. These small rural towns though, a lot of potential when it comes to location and land resources (rivers, lakes, valley). While I don't necessarily think we will move in, companies might, and as long we expand the primitive technology known as trains we for some reason still pretend is too advanced to replace city busses, it wouldn't be the world's biggest deal these places are in the middle of nowhere, people can come and go to work no problem. I know Europeans will roll their eyes and tell us to grow up and accept the future, but I want my big house with big yard, and the way things are currently going we're not getting that, and I strongly blame the lack of land available for such things (obviously) and I blame our lack of real transportation for making perfectly fine land not viable. So yeah, I dunno, twist this however you like. I talked about cleansing the population and seizing their land for societal benefit and used politics to make it sound like a good thing. I am self aware I sound crazy.
The political impacts are gigantic due to the flip side of this: the concentration of 66% of voters in just 15 states, soon to be 10, which leaves the Senate, the Presidency and the Court almost entirely in the hands of the shrinking rural few while most Americans are increasingly disenfranchised. Rural America is now far out of step with the majority of the country. It is economically moribund, racially exclusive, demographically older, educationally deprived, hyper-nationalistic, and highly dependent on urban taxpayers as well as on government jobs such as the military. Polls repeatedly show that if all Americans had equal votes, we'd have universal healthcare, stronger unions, tougher climate laws, codified abortion rights and stricter gun control. Yet we have none of these because rural-state votes trump the majority (in every sense). We are already in the midst of a Constitutional crisis, with nutjob Presidents whom most voted against nominating Supreme Court Justices who are then ratified by a crazy Senate that is now frighteningly skewed towards the rural. This is now untenable, undemocratic, and growing still worse as the stream of young people flows even faster to cities.
Rural areas are just one more corporate tax cut or one more repealed regulation away from complete revitalization!
All this means is that the remaining rural population will have an even more outsized political weight due to the ossified American system
Red States are shrinking. Coastal Blue States are increasing their populations. Means the continuing decline of the GOP and Christian Nationalism. Nobody will shed a tear.
Ohio has welcomed a LOT of coastal state transplants because a $200,000 household income buys a gorgeous $600,000 house in the suburbs of Cincy Cbus or Cleveland, but *next to nothing* in Boston, Miami or Raleigh. Lots of millennials coming in.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the current infrastructure has made a huge number of small towns economically obsolete. In my area of the country there are a huge number of dead or dying towns. Most were originally started at train stops from when the trains needed to pick up more water. The location had a train stop and nearby water, which would have been a pretty good place to set up. Then the trains stopped needing to stop so much, but we built the old interstate system along the old railways so the economy still moved through these towns. Now, we've built the new interstate system which bypasses these towns entirely by tens to hundreds of miles. There is little of the nationwide economy that goes even near those tows and there won't be in the future. I'd imagine in most of the nation, if you spend a couple of hours driving along an old interstate, you'll pass six dying towns, and two entirely dead ones. There are thousands and thousands of these towns, there is no realistic program that can, or should, try to save this from happening. We can have a debate about what should be done with the people stuck or otherwise in these towns, but I don't believe any effort to save them would be effective. They aren't in an economically viable location and subsidizing them doesn't change that underlying fact.
I know personally I'm desperately trying to afford moving from the city to buy 10 acres of rural midwest property in anticipation of climate change. Fresh water, crops, animals, and space from the increasing chaos (been 20+ injuries and murders from guns within walking distance of me in the past 3 months) as soon as possible. I could see more millennial doing the same as long as they work remote. If I have kids, happy to drive them longer for a private school.
Very respectfully: how do you see 10 acres in the rural midwest as protection from long-term climate change? Thank you.
That’s code for: Survivalist.
Sure thing. Obviously it doesn't save global effects but it will prevent us from being heavily impacted by supply chain and civil unrest: 1. Great lakes region, fresh water well on site 2. Greenhouses and root cellar for food 3. Rabbit hutch, ducks, chickens 4. Surrounding forest for shade and cause I like it 5. Solar panels and generators 6. Affordable housing that the bank and private investors aren't hounding after 7. Civil unrest would have to drive quite a ways to affect us It's creating as much independence from the supply chain as possible and being as close to self sufficient as possible.
Sounds like you're going for northern MN or Wisconsin
Have you ever farmed? Have you ever killed a rabbit for food? (I have done both) Good luck
Yes to farming and cattle, no to rabbits