7 ms·

Something Special Is Happening in Rural America

ahelwer 7y ago
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.
- starpilot 7y ago
  It's showing Sabetha, Kansas as the top photo for me.
  - ahelwer 7y ago
    Huh, looks like they changed it.
DHPersonal 7y ago
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 7y ago
  >"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 7y ago
    You're right, it doesn't apply to everyone. I wasn't meaning to speak for anyone but me.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JoelMcCracken 7y ago
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.
- shantly 7y ago
  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.
  - JoelMcCracken 7y ago
    Great point; for us, we do not want children and are sure they are not coming, so this does not factor into our considerations.
  - nikanj 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
adrianN 7y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  As someone who would never move to an urban area, there’s nothing that can be done to make it attractive to a subset of us. I don’t want to live among large amounts of other humans. I don’t want to crawl through traffic when I have to use my car. I’d rather live on acres of land far from the city, and pay for the privilege with regards to infrastructure and energy costs (I have solar on my roof, electric cars, and we offset our carbon emissions). We live a far better life than if I had to earn enough on a single income to support my family “in the city” (forget the Bay Area, even West Loop condos in Chicago are crazy expensive). Remote work uptake will accelerate this trend, versus being forced to live in a city to be close to work. Density isn’t a given, or requirement to live well, and we shouldn’t be so foolish to push it (through half baked policy) on others if they don’t want it. Side note: Support and advocate for remote work!
  - adrianN 7y ago
    As I said, there is a subset of the population that would never live in a city, just as there is a subset that would never live outside a city. But I think that encouraging more people to choose the rural lifestyle by essentially subsidizing it is not the way to go.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      If it’s not subsidized, there’s no issue. I agree it shouldn’t be subsidized, and that we’ll need technology to drive down the cost of low density living (rooftop solar [cheap renewable energy in general], electric vehicles [cars, light and heavy trucks, buses], improved longevity for roads and sidewalks, led streetlights, muni fiber and efficient wireless infra, etc). That’s what technology and innovation are for. Just as with roads (where building more doesn’t help alleviate demand), you must destroy demand for everyone to live in the same spot if you want affordable housing. You do that with fungible remote work and (efficiently and sustainably) providing high quality of life not tied to a place in space time.
AFascistWorld 7y ago
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.
- danknationlotto 7y ago
  bingo
paggle 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Wonder how that correlates to homelessness.
Simulacra 7y ago
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.
- shireboy 7y ago
  "Despite the crime, high taxes, high cost of living, and abundance of traffic" Only that, eh? Kind of hard to argue the city is "safer" when you admit it has higher crime. You should step back and read your comment objectively. You're essentially saying "I don't want to live there because I disagree with [my stereotyped view of] their political/personal views, and am willing to overlook major indicators of quality of living to live with high crime, taxes, traffic, and high CoL." I recognize you may have _reasons_ for your stereotype and I don't want to discount them, but for every anecdotal you may have, there is one in the other direction. I've seen bigots in NY and saints in KS. From where I stand, you're the one being close-minded and bigoted by judging people based on how many other people live around them and assuming you are better than them.
- j4_hnews 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Sadly still too few opportunities and especially faltering health care and education.
Random_Person 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
mywittyname 7y ago
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?
skizm 7y ago
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.
v77 7y ago
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.
oblib 7y ago
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.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  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).
danknationlotto 7y ago
Inflation! yay!

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.

starpilot 7y ago
It's showing Sabetha, Kansas as the top photo for me.
- ahelwer 7y ago
  Huh, looks like they changed it.

DHPersonal 7y ago

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 7y ago
>"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 7y ago
  You're right, it doesn't apply to everyone. I wasn't meaning to speak for anyone but me.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

JoelMcCracken 7y ago

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.

shantly 7y ago
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.
- JoelMcCracken 7y ago
  Great point; for us, we do not want children and are sure they are not coming, so this does not factor into our considerations.
- nikanj 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

adrianN 7y ago

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.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
As someone who would never move to an urban area, there’s nothing that can be done to make it attractive to a subset of us. I don’t want to live among large amounts of other humans. I don’t want to crawl through traffic when I have to use my car. I’d rather live on acres of land far from the city, and pay for the privilege with regards to infrastructure and energy costs (I have solar on my roof, electric cars, and we offset our carbon emissions). We live a far better life than if I had to earn enough on a single income to support my family “in the city” (forget the Bay Area, even West Loop condos in Chicago are crazy expensive). Remote work uptake will accelerate this trend, versus being forced to live in a city to be close to work. Density isn’t a given, or requirement to live well, and we shouldn’t be so foolish to push it (through half baked policy) on others if they don’t want it. Side note: Support and advocate for remote work!
- adrianN 7y ago
  As I said, there is a subset of the population that would never live in a city, just as there is a subset that would never live outside a city. But I think that encouraging more people to choose the rural lifestyle by essentially subsidizing it is not the way to go.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    If it’s not subsidized, there’s no issue. I agree it shouldn’t be subsidized, and that we’ll need technology to drive down the cost of low density living (rooftop solar [cheap renewable energy in general], electric vehicles [cars, light and heavy trucks, buses], improved longevity for roads and sidewalks, led streetlights, muni fiber and efficient wireless infra, etc). That’s what technology and innovation are for. Just as with roads (where building more doesn’t help alleviate demand), you must destroy demand for everyone to live in the same spot if you want affordable housing. You do that with fungible remote work and (efficiently and sustainably) providing high quality of life not tied to a place in space time.

AFascistWorld 7y ago

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.

danknationlotto 7y ago
bingo

paggle 7y ago

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 7y ago
Wonder how that correlates to homelessness.

Simulacra 7y ago

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.

shireboy 7y ago
"Despite the crime, high taxes, high cost of living, and abundance of traffic" Only that, eh? Kind of hard to argue the city is "safer" when you admit it has higher crime. You should step back and read your comment objectively. You're essentially saying "I don't want to live there because I disagree with [my stereotyped view of] their political/personal views, and am willing to overlook major indicators of quality of living to live with high crime, taxes, traffic, and high CoL." I recognize you may have _reasons_ for your stereotype and I don't want to discount them, but for every anecdotal you may have, there is one in the other direction. I've seen bigots in NY and saints in KS. From where I stand, you're the one being close-minded and bigoted by judging people based on how many other people live around them and assuming you are better than them.
j4_hnews 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Sadly still too few opportunities and especially faltering health care and education.

Random_Person 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

mywittyname 7y ago

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?

skizm 7y ago

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.

v77 7y ago

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.

oblib 7y ago

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.

cr0sh 7y ago
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).

danknationlotto 7y ago

Inflation! yay!