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
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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.
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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’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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization?wprov=sfla1
See “Causes” and the link to rural flight.
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.
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.
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.
I remember some guy, anthropologist or something like that, was trying to figure out why it was that people in cities made on average more money than people in small towns or rural areas, until it hit him: That’s why cities exist in the first place.
It would probably help to define the terms you’re using, as there are many ways to interpret “big place”, “small place”, “many people”, etc.
I don’t even know if your starting point is accurate.
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
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.
No modern housing due to NIMBYs here in the UK. A smaller community means renting a tiny attic, basement or god forbid house sharing a room in a partitioned victorian mcmansion for £1k a month or more. In my experience you will also have absolutely psycho neighbours over and over and over.
Trains will be dog shit in the south and you won’t get anywhere fast or reliably and you will pay £50 for the pleasure, the cars are too expensive to have, and nobody wants to sit in traffic. If you’re LGBTQ it’s only a matter of time if you get hatecrimed.
If you talk to anyone you’ll get the cops called on you because talking to strangers is very weird in those communities.
There are insane cliques on Facebook filled with elderly with too much time on their hands who will conspire to attack specific street buskers or Starbucks baristas for being overly “gormless”.
Having a nice hill to stare into fields at is okay, but most likely it’ll be filled with dogs and all those fields and beautiful “”“nature”“” will be privately owned as well.
I live in a small rural community (up North) and don’t find any of this to be true, except for the trains bit (I drive so don’t really use trains) and maybe the Facebook bit as I’ve never used it. The housing is cheaper than it is in the nearby cities and towns. My village has queer people, young, old, ethnic minorities, and pretty much everyone gets on. The whole cops thing isn’t true at all; small communities by and large have friendlier and more welcoming people than cities in my experience. And countryside is objectively a nicer environment than urban sprawl, and better for you to boot. The view from the back of mine is fields with cows and woods, and I’d take that over a train line or tower block any day of the week.
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.
There is not enough stimulation in a small community. In the US, they are also usually full of hateful/ignorant people.
Australian here; I much prefer living away from cities. I like having a big house on a big block with lots of nature and as few other people around me as possible.
The catch is while the housing and land is wayyyy cheaper, other stuff is more expensive and inconvenient. The biggest thing people don’t consider is trades people; you’ll have plumbers, sparkies etc just refuse to even come out when they find out you’re more than half an hour away from civilisation, and if they do come out they charge for the travel.
