
Something Special Is Happening in Rural America - burritofanatic
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/opinion/rural-america.html
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adrianN
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.

~~~
dreamcompiler
> Urban areas are more efficient for almost all resources.

People say this all the time. If it's true, why is the cost of living in an
urban area almost always higher than in a rural area?

~~~
taeric
Because efficient is not the same concept as cheap.

Worse, you are likely looking at the costs of single family home purchasing,
without considering cost of upkeep and transportation. Not to mention
efficiency of getting work done.

That is all to say, because it is complicated. Scale fundamentally makes
things hard to reason about. And cost discussions typically micro optimize a
single factor.

~~~
lacker
_Because efficient is not the same concept as cheap._

It is not precisely the same concept as cheap, but I think you are mistaken
about efficiency. Economic efficiency means that goods are produced at the
lowest possible average total cost.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_efficiency)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_cost)

A wide range of economic goods have a lower average cost in rural areas.
Anything from a 5 bedroom house to a case of Bud Light.

Urban areas are _inefficient_ for most goods. They are popular not because of
their general efficiency, but because they have better-paying jobs.

~~~
taeric
They have a lower unit cost per item to the individual. Sometimes. But
typically only if you ignore transportation and storage costs. And often
infrastructure costs are effectively billed to society.

Consider, I can literally walk to the grocery to buy beer. I suppose I have to
replace my shoes from wear, but no upkeep or gas on my car. No miles of road
that need maintenance to subsidize my trip to the store.

Now, yes, there are miles of road to subsidize getting the store supplied. But
that is shared for all people supplied by the store. Same is true, of course,
for the trips to the store, but again, my side of that equation is zero. Which
is all part of what makes me argue it is more efficient.

And again, complicated with general scale making most observations necessarily
simplistic.

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ahelwer
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.

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starpilot
It's showing Sabetha, Kansas as the top photo for me.

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ahelwer
Huh, looks like they changed it.

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Simulacra
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.

~~~
j4_hnews
Until you get older and realize that you could cash out and benefit from a
change of pace.

Get a nice sized house, with money in the bank, grow a garden, listen to the
quiet, cut your own lawn, and share the experience with other people, who like
you, eventually migrated back to give that small town feel another chance,
later in life.

And now that small town has an art gallery. A Starbucks. Some nice
restaurants. And town councillors that like you, moved back from the city and
have a desire to fix some of what you remember being broken.

Many of the small towns I remember growing up in that were bigoted close
minded places, have gradually changed. Not all. But it's happening.

~~~
AstralStorm
Sadly still too few opportunities and especially faltering health care and
education.

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JoelMcCracken
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.

When in the city we both feel low levels of chronic stress. This is alleviated
when in rural areas.

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.

I have heard from real estate agents that this desire to move to the country
is becoming increasingly common. I don't know really why that is, but I have
to imagine that the ability to work remotely has something to do with it.

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shantly
Good public schools (or good private schools, for that matter) can be hard to
come by out in the sticks, for those to whom that's important. Hard in the
city, too—there's a reason so many families, even those of us who would prefer
either the city or the country, end up in the 'burbs.

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nikanj
In a big city, your kid won't fit into the kindergarten. In the sticks, there
is no kindergarten.

Things suck for young middle-class families.

~~~
shantly
Between the money-based fight to get your kids in better schools (public or
private, it's money either way, just a matter of whether the money's in
tuition or housing) and health care it _does_ kind of seem like the system's
designed to eat every last dollar a normal to well-off-but-not-actually-rich
family can get their hands on.

~~~
JoelMcCracken
of course, these people pay a lot of the taxes. the rich don't, and poor just
don't have the money to pay.

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DHPersonal
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. "Making it" in a big city seems
like it requires losing what is important [edit: for people like me].

~~~
happytoexplain
>"Making it" in a big city seems like it requires losing what is important.

I also hate city life, but I find it depressing that this is just another
instance of everything absolutely having to be an us-vs-them scenario. Why
can't people just enjoy the qualities of city life or suburban life or rural
life without needing to broadly label the other options as somehow awful?

~~~
DHPersonal
You're right, it doesn't apply to everyone. I wasn't meaning to speak for
anyone but me.

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Random_Person
I'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.

I see no appeal in living in restrictive spaces for the chance at having
something "special" to do in the rare moment where I have free time. There's
more than enough for me in my surroundings and if needs be, I'm an hour drive
from Pittsburgh, PA for some "culture" outings.

~~~
JoelMcCracken
We are considering WV. My father lives in Uniontown, so it would be convenient
in that way. I also have a lot of family that live in the general OH/WV
panhandle area.

~~~
Random_Person
There are tech jobs in the northern part of the state. Lots of government
contractor shops around. Pay is... well... government pay, but the cost of
living is ridiculously cheap. My girlfriend is from Moundsville, and she
thinks of the Morgantown area as urban... so I guess we could be more rural.

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skizm
Sucks* that for a lot of us the choice is between making $100k in the suburbs
or $200k in the city. I'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.

*Sucks being relative. I know I don't have it that bad.

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mywittyname
The problem with small towns is, and will always be, the lack of opportunity
for most people.

Most jobs in these places tend towards service jobs. You can'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.

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?

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v77
Since this was an op-ed with a half-assed mix of anecdote and cherry-picked
stats, I'll add my own from one of the more rural Canadian provinces.

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't,
aren't, and are still undergoing rapid depopulation and farm consolidation
into very-large commodity crop growers (canola, wheat, pulses, beef/pork).

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/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.

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oblib
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's time Hollywood
did a remake of "Deliverance" to squash this trending idea.

I actually had friends in LA tell me "they'll make you squeal like a pig
there!" before I left. I'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.

The area where I moved to has grown fast over the past 30 years. Still pretty
nice though, and I'm glad I've spent those years here. No amount of money
would've been worth spending them in LA.

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cr0sh
To be fair, Deliverance was a bit more recent of a movie when you left, so one
could see why they made such references, unfair as they were and still are
(that said, I know for a fact that characters as depicted in the movie do
exist, we just don't run into 'em often - good thing - nor really discuss them
- bad thing).

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AFascistWorld
The situations seem dire, speculation of properties means you either
participate or lose , there's no escape and no other choice, you can avoid it
but you can'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.

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paggle
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.

~~~
almost_usual
Wonder how that correlates to homelessness.

