Just the title
Seen lots of people moving to big places , but im from a small town and id go back there in a heartbeat if i had WFH option (not possible with current job)
To clarify, im a European and its a question for everyone , not just americans!
Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
Don’t worry they conveniently forgot too.
That plus other services like rural hospitals and education are huge drawbacks to living in most of rural America.
Also a bunch of other issues with small town living like lack of privacy/anonymity, entertainment, restaurants, government services, etc… And these problems get more severe the smaller the community.
But people really did spread out to smaller towns during COVID. Property values went crazy in a lot of small towns around me.
I live in a small mountain town, and property values went apeshit. Like a house/cabin that was $150-250k is now $4-500k. It’s insane.
Privacy and anonymity is definitely still a thing as long as you keep you business to yourself, because as I’m guessing you’re alluding to, people are pretty chatty as it is and a smaller population makes it more difficult. It also helps to not be an asshole and give people even more to talk about, especially when most everyone knows each other.
Even without direct interaction, it’s easier to know someone as “the guy in the cabin on hillside road with the blue Honda CRV and the beard”. I assume that’s what the comment meant since they tied privacy to anonymity
I mean yeah, it’s not uncommon to know where each other live, there’s also that unspoken respect of leave people alone. Also yet another reason to not be an asshole in a small town lol.
Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
It’s actually happened multiple times…
I remember two off the top of my head, but it’s possible there was a couple more
European
As an American, it’s because there’s nothing out there. We have SO much land. A small town means you have to drive everywhere. It means the local grocery is 30 min away. It also means 300 people in the town, one library (maybe), but at least three churches. Very much not my vibe :-)
Not everywhere, obviously, but it’s a thing.
I live in a city of over 100,000 people and my grocery store is 25 minutes away. About an hour if I walk.
I grew up in a small town and had two grocery stores within 8 minutes. Everything was a lot more expensive and there was less selection.
Moved because of the lack of services (no hospital, volunteer FD and ambulance, no high school, no college nearby, no taxi service, no bus service, everything shut down at 6 PM).
I feel you on that.
I live in a town of about 71,000 The nearest grocery store which is a little bit more expensive is seven minutes by car. The other one that’s a little bit less expensive is about 15 to 20 minutes by car.
Out of curiosity, what region are you in? I live in a city of ~80,000 in the northeastish US and I’m not even sure it’s possible to be more than 5 or 10 minutes from a grocery store here.
West… there’s a lot more sprawl here AND rush hour traffic that lasts half the day, even on weekends.
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Poor infrastructure in many of these communities, and no way to get to larger towns and cities without a car. So you’re stuck with crappy chain stores and terrible quality food, harming your health. And it’s boring, because it can’t support many kinds of entertainment.
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Smaller communities tend to skew towards conservatives, and there’s little way to escape from it (due to the distances and the lack of high speed rail). So expect more religiosity, more discrimination, and politicians that are even shittier than the average.
Huh , i forgor about americans and their shit-frastracture … im from europe and our villages/small towns are dying even tho most of what you said isnt true for us.
Idk whats it about , as most people my age (late 20s early 30s) want to live in a smaller town nearby but noone is moving there just staying in the big cities.
I think you need to specify your European country, because small French villages have awful infrastructure while their cities have amazing infrastructure.
But even here in the Netherlands, if I’d live in a village and I wanted to go to another village further away I’d need to take the train to the nearest city and then take another train to said village. This often takes much longer than by car. Also, while basic shopping needs like a supermarket, greengrocer and some basic repair shops might be there (maybe just the supermarket) you don’t have access to… Anything else really, and need to take the car there, too. Sadly, necessary non-commercial facilities like hospitals and higher education are also missing from most villages here.
Yeah, even in the Randstad, for distances up to like 15 km it’s often faster to cycle somewhere than take public transport.
Well, I lived in such conditions most of my adulthood before having a kid to care for, and it was possible precisely because it was just me. Either it was a small town not even close to a big city, or it was a small town at the outskirts of a big city, some 20-30km away. I loved it. Still do.
But it’s so hard to uproot once you have all the other stuff like not only your own job, but also your partner’s. And kid’s school or daycare or whatever. And then having to work out the bus routes for the small humans and figure whether or not it’d be plausible for them to adjust to that and not get burned out or lost or confused or whatever.
And once you need more space, it’s much harder to find places to rent in the small towns. Mostly for sale, if it’s beyond two bedrooms. And in that case it’s much more complicated since you need to go to the effort of getting the place evaluated, arranging the loans and finances so you can pull it off, and that’s a big decision since it’ll probably lock you in there for quite some while, because small towns don’t move houses fast if you decide to go, so you could be looking at years before you get the sale done and another mortgage.
It’s just so hard. Once you are in the city, it’s hard to leave. And the more you root in the city, the harder it gets.
I hate it. I hate the city. I hate most about it.
But I love my family and would suffer in a city until my death if that’s what it takes to keep it together.
But as a positive anecdote, in my life prior to rooting down, as a younger and more adventurous human, I found that maintaining a community and a good group of friends even somewhat far away from the rest of them is easy and most importantly, comes easy. Its natural. I never found community a problem, because I always had a few groups of friends and it was always enough for us to touch ground together only monthly or every other month, so our location wasn’t really a concern. Most of us lived apart anyway. And the actual day-to-day sense of community came from work or uni or that kind of thing. I was never alone, though I lived blissfully far from most everyone.
So the only thing that really makes it difficult is trying to find a way and a good timing for not only one, but three+ people to move at once with all of them being happy with it. That’s a puzzle I’ve found near impossible to crack.
If we had a lot of money saved or good enough jobs to get a nest egg going, the problems likely wouldn’t matter and could very easily be worked around. But alas, we are just lower middle class, and while we are well enough off, moving is a completely life changing and paradigm shifting thing. It’s not something to choose lightly.
Maybe that plays a part within your group of acquaintances too? My work is even WFM and my partner could likely commute easily from most of the options we have within 100km. So technically we have a lot going for it. Should be easier.
But it’s not. Life is complex.
Edit: For context, I’m in Europe too.
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I’m weird as fuck. Other people who are as weird as fuck as me are possible to be found, but a small community makes it unlikely if not impossible. People as weird as me can only really be found in a big enough place with enough people.
And yeah, there’s also just much more to do than in a smaller town. Taking 30-45 minutes to arrive at something you wanna do is a significant hurdle compared to 5-10 minutes.
I don’t drive. Where I live, you can really only “not drive” in cities. And even then, it can be hard at times.
At the same time, I live within reasonable commuting distance of multiple friends and family members. I can walk to a few of them. I don’t need to be closer to my community.
I might want to retire someplace quieter, but I like being able to hop on a train or a bus to get to somewhere fun, or to be able to walk across the street to a store if I need something. Heck, I can even easily get takeout if I don’t feel like cooking – I don’t even need delivery.
I can even easily get takeout if I don’t feel like
And I’ll take that up a notch. I currently live in a small city outside a large one, and I can walk to get takeout, from
- American diner
- Greek kebabs
- Pakistani kebabs
- several Indian restaurants
- several Chinese restaurants
- several Mexican restaurants
- at least one Salvadoran
- at least one Chilean
- some sort of African thing I haven’t yet tried
- …… and so many more
Our new family activity for pandemic was to walk for takeout from the new Punjabi restaurant, and eat dinner on a bench in the town common…… try that in your small town
When we lived in a bigger place, we got used to going down to the massive Asian supermarket, the French bakery, the Balkan place down the street, the dirt-cheap Salvadorean/pupusa place. I admit I did start taking it for granted, then moved away and remembered, “Oh, right, they don’t have cool stuff everywhere.”
I’ve personally been thriving since moving to a big city. I never want to go back to the middle of nowhere. I enjoy urban exploration, I love the diversity of business and people, and I love the sheer amount of community that exists. I love that there’s always new things to find. That just doesn’t exist outside of cities.
Infintevalence pretty much nailed it
We’re country as fuck up here. Not a small town any more, but still more rural than suburban.
While we’re in driving distance of a good hospital, it’s a drive, not something in town. There’s just not enough people to keep a hospital in use often enough to make it reasonable in a capitalist system at all, but even in an ideal, post scarcity system, the resources to build and run hospitals are going to be best located where the most people can benefit from it.
And pretty much everything scales the same. Why locate a big university in a town with maybe 10k people if you include outlying areas? To support that kind of endeavor, you’d need more people to do the work, so the town would get bigger because of the large undertaking.
It’s a balance. If you want to have bigger centralized services, you need more people to make it work. And, if you don’t already have the population, attracting bigger things is harder, so the chances of things like public transit, resource intensive facilities, exotic supplies/foods coming there are lower.
It results in people that value the benefits of a smaller population center over the usual benefits of a bigger center being the only ones that’ll move out
My neighborhood is my “small community”. I don’t need to leave the city for that.
Interesting … usually where i live, neighbourhoods in big cities arent well connected so i never saw it that way i guess ?
More power to people who can organise like that !
I don’t like conservative communities, i get threatened for not being a white man
All small communities left in the US are just the angry conservatives who were too stubborn to leave.
As someone who has lived in a couple of small places before, for me it’s accessibility. The first place I lived at for the longest since birth pretty much, there were so few places to go to. You had to kill 45 miles back and to, to get anywhere and that ate a lot of gas to do so. My place of origin, didn’t really put anything interesting down that would attract more people to want to go to, converse in or conduct commerce in. Yeah the small community may have bonded people together, but it was all still relatively small.
Where I am at now, it feels bigger, there’s more opportunity around and everything. I’m having a bit of a difficult time imagining where I could go if I decide to move that equals where I’m living now.
The reasons I moved from a town of 3,500 people to around 100,000 people after 2 years are
More dating options: most of the women in the small town I lived in were already in relationships or weren’t compatible. I started dating my wife a few months after I moved
Better access to services: if I wanted to get groceries on Sunday I would have to drive 30 minutes to the next town over and banks would be closed before 5. The local restaurants were good but there were only a few.
Better access to fun stuff: I train jiu jitsu and the closest gym to where I lived was a 50 minute drive 1 way and the closest 10+ mile bike trail was 30 minutes away. I would stay at my friend’s house overnight or get a hotel so I could have a decent night on the town since it was also 50 minutes away from home
There are opportunities to have fun and build a happy life in small towns but if you have niche interests then it can be a little lonely. Plus some of the activities are private so it can be harder to find them and access them.
The upside was the people there are really nice and it was really cheap to live there so I paid off a ton of debt.
If I could get a fully remote job and move to the middle of BFE… Well, I’m considering doing that without a remote job, and just accepting that any job I can get will take a longer commute and probably earn pay less. I lived in Chicago for more than a decade, lived in San Diego a few years. Currently I live in a rural part of my state, but the city keeps creeping nearer, and I’m seeing farms in my county get bulldozed to put in yet another housing development “…starting from the low, low $600s!” of identical, oversized, characterless houses with 1/4 acres plots of land and no trees.
I don’t want neighbors. I want trees, deer eating my hostas, raccoons trying to tear open my garbage bins, and bears being oversized raccoons. I want candles and laterns in every room because the power goes out every time there’s a thunderstorm, a woodburning stove that I can feed with trees that get blown down, and enough land that I can raise goats, chickens, and do a little dirt farming, in addition to my job. I want to opt out of this goddamn rat race, and just have a quiet place where I can offer people refuge from the bullshit that’s happening around us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization?wprov=sfla1
See “Causes” and the link to rural flight.
I don’t know, the whole being completely surrounded by backwards fucking hicks who hate my mere existence for living my life as who I actually am might have something to do with it.
Maybe, just maybe, I like living near people who accept me for who I am and most of those people are in cities while the rural areas are filled with hate filled fucking jackasses who couldn’t manage to fucking read Green Eggs & Ham even if they had a gun pointed at their head with the threat of death if they failed.
The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.
Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to go where they’d like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.
The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.
You’re being incredibly over dramatic. Plenty of businesses thrive off of mostly middle or lower income customers.
Cities are just better. Rich or no rich, larger amounts of people means more restaurants and things to do.
I don’t think I am being over dramatic, I’d love to know what specifically you think isn’t grounded or reasonable.
Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I’m talking about a slope here - a velocity. “Increasingly…” means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we’ll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there’s 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.
More restaurants in cities because there’s more money in cities because there’s more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It’s all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.
Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can’t build that infrastructure because… of a lot of reasons, but I’d argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it’s only getting worse.
It’s why populism is so popular right now. It’s why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It’s why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it’s why if they’re not careful they’ll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.
Wealth inequality is everything.
Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer,
This part specifically is the what I was referring to. Basically, I feel as though you’re overemphasizing the “rich” aspect of why people live in cities. Tons of people just like being around other people.
The faster money flows, the more expensive jobs can be provided, and in the country side money moves slower. Wages being higher in cities isn’t because that’s where the rich are; it’s because there’s more places to spend money, so everything changes hands quicker and “creates” more money.(While I do think that plenty of modern econ is bunk bullshit, that’s one concept that rings true).
While I do agree that the rich kills small towns, I think it’s primarily a different reason—big box stores like walmart and medium boxes like dollar general using abusive price practices like undercutting using their wealth to push out the smaller competition, and make it nigh impossible for new places to get going.
Wealth inequality is quite meaningful, but I think it’s far from everything. There’s a lot of smaller reasons why cities tend to be better places to live, that don’t have to do with the rich.
One good example is that higher density means more gov $ per sqrmile, even if the people are poorer, and more infrastructure can be shared, making it cheaper to build. That results in cities inevitably having better infrastructure than the countryside
I think you’re misattributing things here that I think can and should be explained by wealth inequality. Big box stores don’t kill small towns because they destroy competition, they kill small towns because some percentage of money spent at a big box store leaves that small town. It’s not the lack of competition that kills small towns it’s the fact that after those small town businesses close less wealth exists in the hands of people in that small town. There’s less money moving around in that town because a portion of it is being siphoned off to big box store profits which go to shareholders and out of state C-suites and the likes.
Yes, higher density means more taxes are raised per area which means it’s easier to spend on infrastructure in high density areas but you’re missing the point. If wealth was distributed properly we’d have enough money to build all the infrastructure we want comparatively almost regardless of the density of the population. As wealth inequality grows less taxes are being paid to the government in high density and low density scenarios. As wealth inequality grows the more the government is in debt to the wealthy and the less it can spend on vital services. There’s enough money in the system to pay for Internet and hospitals and rail and school to service every person in the US but the money isn’t held by everyone, it’s held by people who have those services covered where they are and so they don’t care if they drain the rest of the country of those things. Wealth inequality explains why small towns are dying because it explains why they can’t afford to stay open, stay profitable, stay connected, stay healthy.
And to circle back around to your original paragraphs, I don’t care how much people like living in big cities they can’t live there on vibes alone. They have to go where the money is, and you best believe when Boeing opens up a new plant in a city they put a whole lot of money into that city (ignoring city special contracts for a moment). I like living in a big city, I want to move to an even bigger city, I’m not because I don’t have a job there right now. I live where the work is. And yes, denser cities means more jobs and more opportunities but that only gets less true and less meaningful the more wealth inequality grows. If I can’t afford to rent a flat in 10 years, the same way I can’t afford to rent a house today then what’s the point? If my job doesn’t pay me meaningfully more in 10 years because stocks have to go up (please read that as wealth inequality) then what’s the point? Cities don’t create jobs or high paying jobs because money moves fast, it’s because that’s where the wealth is. Look at any major city in the US (at least) and you can find the increasingly small list of increasingly massive companies that have offices there and you can trace the money. If Kansas city lost Garmin or Hallmark they’d feel it, if the government went further into debt and had to slash services Kansas City would feel it, if one of the massive freight companies left KC would feel it. The point is cities are built on wealth and the movement of wealth, but if it increasingly is drained out of those cities it will be harder and harder to sustain those cities. It won’t matter where people like living, they’ll have to move to where the money is.
I really do think looking at where money comes from and where it’s going is critical to understanding why the standard of living is declining while there’s never been more wealth or productivity in history. We could all own homes, all have healthcare, have highspeed rail, higher education, if only the rich didn’t exist. We have to tax them out of existence and build a system that works for the overwhelming majority of people instead of the 1%.
The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes.
Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile. They just park a higher percentage of their wealth in wealth-generating financial assets, which leech wealth from the rest of society.
We need a tax on all registered securities, (with exemption for the first $10 million owned by a natural person.) That tax should be paid not in cash, but in shares of the security: the IRS should slowly liquidate those shares over time, such that IRS sales never constitute more than 1% of total traded volume.
We further need the punitively-high top-tier tax rate we had for most of the 20th century. That tax rate pushed businesses to spend their excess income, turning it into other people’s paychecks. It discouraged the kind of wealth-hoarding investment that is stunting consumer spending.
“Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile.”
But that’s the thing, as the wages of workers goes down their ability to consume goes down as well. Sure they’ll never stop needing food and clothes but new cars, sushi, new TVs, vacations, preventative healthcare, higher education, etc - these things become impossible. Debt will surely be the next step to keep the engine running but that will only accelerate the transfer of wealth because debt is paid to those who have assets. And quite frankly we’re already there - university (in the US), the rise of buy now and pay later programs, healthcare the moment you need to use it - these things require massive debt today. It’ll only get worse.
As wealth gets drained from the working class into the owning class, the only meaningful consumers for the majority of goods and services will be the owning class. Services will increasingly be focused on the wealthy or on methods of serving the poor via borrowing from the rich (which only exasperates their poverty).
