Something Special Is Happening in Rural America

I think encouraging deurbanization is a mistake. Urban areas are more efficient for almost all resources. What we need is making urban areas more attractive. Some people will of course always choose a lifestyle that prefers a big house, which we can't provide in an urban area, but we can address other benefits people see in a rural setting by smarter city planning. Sound insulation, so that neighbors are not a problem, green spaces in the city, train connections to recreational areas outside the city, walkability, neighborhood communities, all these things can be achieved with proper city planning without sacrificing the efficiency benefits of the urban area.

Kinda weird they chose Ouray, Colorado for the illustrative photo. That place's economy is nearly 100% based on tourism for mountain sports and ice climbing in the canyon south of the city.

I don't care how much longing I might have for the small town I grew up in, I will never go back, and will never consider moving back. It was a bigoted, closed-minded place growing up and it's still that way today. Rural America has very little to offer anyone except cheap housing, and cheap food. Despite the crime, high taxes, high cost of living, and the abundance of traffic, the city is safer.

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and moved to Pittsburgh for Uni about a decade ago. My wife and I are making plans to move to the country, for me returning, but for her living there for the first time.<p>When in the city we both feel low levels of chronic stress. This is alleviated when in rural areas.<p>Right now our worries are finding a place for the right price, sufficiently removed from other people, close to enough places that we care about, access to fast internet.<p>I have heard from real estate agents that this desire to move to the country is becoming increasingly common. I don&#x27;t know really why that is, but I have to imagine that the ability to work remotely has something to do with it.

We moved to Houston, Texas, to pursue a job offer. We left less than two years later to a suburb of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Smaller cities or at least smaller-town lifestyles are more our style. &quot;Making it&quot; in a big city seems like it requires losing what is important [edit: for people like me].

I&#x27;ve lived (nearly) my entire life in a small town in West Virginia. Like most kids from rural areas, I was looking for my first ticket out of here. I joined the Marines, explored the world and busy city life... and promptly returned to my small hometown.<p>I see no appeal in living in restrictive spaces for the chance at having something &quot;special&quot; to do in the rare moment where I have free time. There&#x27;s more than enough for me in my surroundings and if needs be, I&#x27;m an hour drive from Pittsburgh, PA for some &quot;culture&quot; outings.

Sucks* that for a lot of us the choice is between making $100k in the suburbs or $200k in the city. I&#x27;d MUCH rather live in the burbs or country, but at the end of the day you just make so much more money living in an urban environment even after accounting for cost of living.<p>*Sucks being relative. I know I don&#x27;t have it that bad.

The problem with small towns is, and will always be, the lack of opportunity for most people.<p>Most jobs in these places tend towards service jobs. You can&#x27;t just move to Columbia. MO and expect to find a professional job. The best way to earn a good living in these areas is to own a business, which is not really feasible for most people. Once these rural towns have a critical mass of businesses to support an influx of professionals, they begin to evolve from small town to suburbia.<p>I say this as someone who was raised in a town of 515 people, 45-minutes from the closest Walmart. There was nothing there when I left, and that fact has remained over the past 20 years. Why would anyone move to that small town over the hundreds of identical ones all over the state?

Since this was an op-ed with a half-assed mix of anecdote and cherry-picked stats, I&#x27;ll add my own from one of the more rural Canadian provinces.<p>The small towns and smaller farms that are doing well are those that are within reasonable commuting range of the bigger centers. The ones that aren&#x27;t, aren&#x27;t, and are still undergoing rapid depopulation and farm consolidation into very-large commodity crop growers (canola, wheat, pulses, beef&#x2F;pork).<p>The success of rural-heavy jurisdictions of North America are those that will give up on the losing fight to keep every small town alive and start investing in the job-creating urban areas. However, the Conservative&#x2F;Republican parties that are often in power in these areas know they depend on their rural base and often do the opposite, spending money on highways and crop subsidies rather than transit and education.

Having left Los Angeles to move to a very rural area in 1988 because quality of life is far more important than yearly income and that really is pretty sucky no matter where you live in LA or NY City, I think it&#x27;s time Hollywood did a remake of &quot;Deliverance&quot; to squash this trending idea.<p>I actually had friends in LA tell me &quot;they&#x27;ll make you squeal like a pig there!&quot; before I left. I&#x27;m not sure how many here will get those old references, but it really was a thing when I told my friends in LA I was leaving.<p>The area where I moved to has grown fast over the past 30 years. Still pretty nice though, and I&#x27;m glad I&#x27;ve spent those years here. No amount of money would&#x27;ve been worth spending them in LA.

The situations seem dire, speculation of properties means you either participate or lose , there&#x27;s no escape and no other choice, you can avoid it but you can&#x27;t avoid the inflation and wealth gap that come with it, the people joining the frenzy are richer and richer while you are poorer and poorer.

What’s “special” is that urban house prices doubled or tripled in ten years. I wonder what it would take to flip some of these states to Democratic.