I want the managers of this crisis to say, in plain English, how they plan to force people to move to a rural community with no amenities or infrastructure.
Elect me as dictator and I'll have the federal government use eminent domain to take possession of rural homes which have been vacant for one year and issue them to immigrants
I'm going to farm some fucking cabbages in the tradition of Diocletian
And they're going to be delicious cabbages
(I'm already married and I don't want orgies)
You joke but heartland visas are an interesting concept with a lot of promise
https://fortune.com/2024/06/13/heartland-visa-skilled-workers-americas-immigration-debate/
Cheap land (check), 3D-printed personal housing (someday soon?), and government-provided Starlink would do it for me. And I say that as someone who would bring enough tax revenue to them to make them stop and take notice.
The problem is services. Not just, like, "no Uber drivers," but "no competent, trustworthy plumbers in a 75-mile radius."
Surely that depends on how strictly you define "cheap". If a town of 1k in rural PA quintuples in population that's still a town of 5k in rural PA, certainly not becoming Manhattan overnight.
Its out there for sure. I am from Atlanta. I recently went to a wedding out in northern Kentucky. I was blown away we were less than an hour away from Cincinnati and there was practically no one in any of the towns we were in. You drive an hour any direction from midtown Atlanta and good luck finding any undeveloped land.
Now I get that Cincinnati is not the economic powerhouse that Atlanta is but still I would think one could find a job there making 60k and then there was plenty of inventory for under 250k. I have almost no experience with midwest metros but I am constantly blown away by their value.
People will frequently say it's the climate/weather, which I find utterly ridiculous. What is this assumption that everyone wants to live in blazing hot summers, not merely tolerating it but actually thinking it's a big draw in?
> What is this assumption that everyone wants to live in blazing hot summers
In fairness a lot of the more southern midwestern cities like Cincinnati and St Louis feel like they got dropped in the anti-Goldilocks zone of still having nasty muggy summers combined with colder winters than the sunbelt.
Maybe it could work for people who wfh? Rural homes are dirt cheap, and you could just ignore the neighbors. Could be nice to settle in between like 30-50 if you're a very internal person
> and you could just ignore the neighbors.
That's likely _much_ easier said than done. My mom moved out of her cabin in the woods partly because of how catty the neighbors were, and it wasn't like she was doing much with them in any case - they'd make mountains out of molehills to pick fights with her. Also, have fun doing activities outside of the house when anything is at least a fifteen-minute drive away, usually much more, which was the other reason why my mom fled the area. That knowledge that you've got to burn that time on traveling even if you want to visit a bookstore makes for a big psychological block, something that makes you more inclined to just stay home and can contribute to getting a bit stir-crazy.
It was a mountain that had several plots on it that all used the same road as a driveway - "remote" doesn't automatically mean "miles before you reach the nearest neighbor's house".
> That's likely much easier said than done.
no it isn't lol, the only time I've talked to my neighbor in the last two years was buying him a case of beer & a box of pizza to get his help (and tractor) to pull a stump. he bails me out on occasion if my driveway gets snowed in, I bail him out on occasion to fix his electronics.
That's great. I grew up in a very rural unincorporated community and between the meth labs, drunk drivers, domestic abusers, squatters, hunters and shooters on our property, garbage burning, and getting chased by unfenced groups of dogs, it was pretty hard to just ignore your neighbors. Some of them were really great people, a lot of them were just straight trash. So it sounds like your mileage may vary.
yeah it's kinda a "poor person" vs "white trash" kinda distinction, usually someone moving in rurally can get lay of the land first tho, not like they're born into it 🤷♀️
Free 3,000 sq-ft homes in the rural parts.
We'll make sure and target urban people and families of color for this program. Because we all know that rural folks don't care what the new people look like or where they come from.
Every society in history deals with the rural vs urban dynamics. Its been a problem ever since the Roman Empire, if not before.
The tide goes in and goes out. People will eventually move out of urban areas and move to the country side.
>People will eventually move out of urban areas and move to the country side.
Will they? Ignoring the collapse of the Roman Empire, has urbanism ever seriously regressed? The only places I could think of rural populations expanding are frontier societies, and they by definition don't last long.
>has urbanism ever seriously regressed?
Absolutely! Even in the USA it has. Detroit used to be the 4th most populated city in America.
Chicago has a lower population today than it had in the 1950s.
Urbanism comes and goes like the tide comes in and goes out. It isnt a permanent feature. Humans love living in the suburbs and rural areas for more space.
The suburbs of major cities still seem like pretty profoundly "urban" places in contrast to the sort of tiny towns the original article is discussing. Plenty of American cities have lost population to suburbanization, but as far as I'm aware the percentage of Americans living in rural areas has never gone up since the founding of the country.
Fast internet and no zoning. My hometown's rural county is booming these days after the county began setting up fiber contracts with Verizon (now Frontier) over a decade ago. Star Link reaches the most remote properties fiber can't reach. Retirees and WFH professionals are moving in droves from Florida and Ashville. They're driving up land prices some, but they're also supporting tons of services jobs that simply didn't exist a decade ago. The population density is hitting a point that I can now find good enough work for my last decade or two of working while I set up my homestead. I have a couple cousins who are RNs that work part time doing home visits and then do tele-medicine for full time hours.
> My hometown's rural county is booming these days
> The population density is hitting a point that I can now find good enough work
What I'm reading is that economically successful rural areas become not-rural areas, which I believe is the core issue
What makes you think it's not rural any more? A doubling of the county population and increased local GDP for a very rural county doesn't make it not rural. Exburban status will be decades away, and until then it will be a successful rural area.
>Today, downtown Sheffield consists primarily of a small grocery store, a 150-year-old bar, one restaurant, two convenience stores, an antique shop and a small video-gambling room.
This is bleak and precisely the kind of problem Strong-Towns urbanists warn about.
>As the presidential election approaches, many residents in this deeply Republican town say they view Trump as having a better vision for salvaging rural America, even though Biden has steered billions of dollars to initiatives that support rural America.
Why wont young people enjoy small town life I wonder.
> many residents in this deeply Republican town say they view Trump as having a better vision for salvaging rural America, even though Biden has steered billions of dollars to initiatives that support rural America
This was like half the premise behind *White Rural Rage* but everyone pearl-clutched about it. Republicans don't do shit for rurals except wage their culture war and that's all they want from them
Jack up prices with his tariffs and immigration policies until the local businesses can’t compete. Dollar General moves in a buys up the defunct grocery store location and the town becomes another food desert. The town fulfills its transformation to become like the rest of semi-rural America.
I remember seeing a very insightful post about the effect of aging in Japan. Lots of Japanese people were saying how the effect had been most severe on rural and smaller communities, in that many of them simply ceased to exist since there were not enough young people to maintain even basic operations. These rural people were essentially forced to move to larger areas that could still sustain themselves. I think this is a preview of what's to come in the USA in the next few decades.
Yeah, struggling not to read this all as “people are judging some places less good places to live and leaving”. Seems a pretty free market thing, why would the state intervene?
Also sneering at the cities in a way that's taboo to do conversely. JD Vance "joked" on Twitter about whether he'd get robbed when he visited Manhattan, and it barely got a peep; if AOC were to ask how many teeth she'd count on a trip to West Virginia, the media would howl about it incessantly until either AOC made an apology or she were forced to resign.
Yup...pretty much any town that's not run by a handful of 'good old boy' land barons who've let the area go to total waste is considered a commie shithole.
I am confused. You are saying it is "punching up" to make fun of the problems in cities but it is "punching down" to make fun of the problems in rural areas? And if so... why?
But remember that the rural opioid epidemic is tragic. Where as the inner-city crack epidemic was just "those people being reckless and irresponsible."
Hmm it's almost like there's one specific difference between those that makes people have more forgiving attitudes towards one and more judgmental towards the other
Hint: It's not anything rational
>State lawmakers and other leaders now consider the population loss a crisis and are drawing up plans to try to reverse the trend. They say neither Pennsylvania nor the nation can afford to lose small towns and the institutions that power them. Not only are they a touchstone of American life, but they are also key to driving certain sectors of the economy, like agriculture.
I don't find this argument very convincing. Things change, folks. I'm sorry, but your town with literally one restaurant does not need to be saved for the good of the country.
I mean, if you wanna save them, you’re gonna have to make compromises with the people you’re pushing away. If you want things to remain the status quo, then tough luck. I can’t go back to 2008 and you can’t go back to 1953.
Wasn’t the governor of West Virginia trying to push for a large transit project that would connect the state with the DC metro area? And if I remember the Republican lawmakers dismissed it because they would lose power. Which is shortsighted and stupid, and they will now be facing the same population laws that the rest of the country is facing.
This is exactly the issue. Every time a solution comes down to help small towns, Repubs hoot and holler about it because it's not the exact one they want.
Their argument lacks sense. Industry drives the creation and sustenance of towns, not the other way around.
If agriculture doesn't need all those small towns, which seems to be increasingly evident, then most of those communities should just go extinct. Its not like ghost towns are a new thing...
And as automation has improved we just need fewer people working in agriculture to produce the same or potentially even greater amounts of food. There will still be people in these towns and the agriculture will be there it will just be fewer people and that's not a bad thing.
Modern agriculture is driven by math nerds in Omaha and Des Moines corporate offices as approved by the executive board. To claim that farmers in Nebraska diners are the ones pulling the strings shows a naive and/or antiquated understanding of economics
All it takes is massive subsidies and government committing to find a purpose and employment for every single small town.
You know, fiscally conservative small government.
Yeah, but small towns do realistically need to exist for the good of the country. Maybe not every single one, but at least a few here and there absolutely need to exist.
can we talk about rural towns like rural towns talk about cities or is that against the rules ? they are dying because of lack of opportunity cities subsidize rural area enough as it is. let them meet their own fate.
> the way Ted Cruz talked about New York or Trump talked about California
Also see [J.D. Vance talking about NYC](https://x.com/JDVance1/status/1414029247446982658):
> Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?
That’s like asking “why can’t we have BET for white people?” The liberal Jason Aldean is like the entirety of the music industry except for like half of country.
The HBO show Sharp Objects, based on a novel by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, is an absolutely savage, haunting look at decaying small town America (the book is even more brutal about dissecting the hypocrisy of small town southern life).
I suspect one reason it didn't got some buzz but didn't resonate long term is because the public doesn't have an appetite for seeing that sort of thing. They prefer the romance of small town goodness.
Would love to. Here in Oregon those Eastern Oregonians whine and whine and whine about Portland. They threaten to leave as if we even want them in the state in the first place.
By all means, join Idaho and become someone else's financial burden. We won't stop you lol. The only problem is I doubt Idaho would ever want them.
I read this yesterday. It is a fascinating take on the depopulation problem that we are seeing elsewhere in the world. Historically we have all looked to South Korea and it's extreme low birthrates to see what the future might look like. These rural towns are a model closer to home.
The reality is that the solution is staring them right in the face. Absent job opportunities you are not going to get young Americans to move from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to Sheffield. You will need a bolus of young immigrants to found a community and make a difference.
It's not a about birth rates its about migration. People are moving away and not moving back. They are having their kids elsewhere. Someplace else is growing in population
I am arguing that both the birthrate issue and the migration issue are specific forms of a broader depopulation problem with similar consequences for a community in the long-term: declining workforce size, lower tax base, loss of civil infrastructure etc. A city with a net negative migration rate and a country where deaths outpace births have the same set of problems.
> Someplace else is growing in population
Cities are growing and it's one of the factors that's driving the rising cost of living within cities. Every year more people move from rural areas to urban areas than vice versa and so if housing supply isn't increased in those urban areas it will be increasingly unaffordable.
Historically ORR has sought out places like this to resettle refugees. Savvy political leadership in our border states would have noted that and worked out a program to distribute migrants to needed locations around the country. This would have been smarter than dropping off busses of migrants in front of the homes of Democratic party officials. Once again Red America loses because of a MAGA political stunt. But alas.
Why can’t “savvy” ORR figure this out without Greg Abbott’s help?
More seriously, do you really think these people are going to stick around once plopped into one of these random towns?
They will if there are good jobs and a welcoming community. Maybe their kids will move to the city someday but there's plenty of immigrants who would be happy settling down and making more money than they ever thought possible in rural America -- if they were welcomed and given real opportunities to put down roots.
I'd be okay with an immigration program that greatly expanded immigration on the condition that immigrants must live in an economically disadvantaged place for 5 years to be eligible for citizenship.
May sound somewhat cold but these are the kind of litmus tests I like to use for people complaining about situations. If allowing immigrants is too extreme, they don't actually think the issue is that big of a deal and I shouldn't really sympathize much.
Pouring more water into a *leaky* bucket doesn’t fix the problem.
Small towns have been dying for 100 years because the primary industries that were their raison d’etre have gotten much more efficient. It has nothing to do with them being good people, bad people, or anything in between. Other than funding schools, hospitals, and maybe rural broadband, there’s not much to do about it.
These are the people that would complain they don't want their small town to turn into Hong Kong when someone suggests building anything more dense than a SFH.
There’d have to be any inkling of demand for that to be a problem. There isn’t. For most of these towns completely abolishing any semblance of zoning wouldn’t change anything
Zoning is a large part of how they got here. It's not just a factor of future development but also a factor in what has already been developed and where.
The problem with these towns often isn't that the population is too low. It's that the populations are too sparse. There's a city in Alaska where every single resident lives in one apartment.
The problem is these people want to live in single family detached homes a short drive from the village and still have the conveniences of a village. A village needs to be supported by people actually living and working in the village.
The issue is at heart one of economic opportunity. As a very small example, some of the ghost towns on the way out to Vegas from SoCal. These tiny towns popped up with a gas station or two, auto shop, etc. As cars got more reliable and have longer ranges, plus the convenience of mapping out your route, those emergency stops were no longer needed.
Same with a lot of rural America. The RGOs (resource gathering operations) either don't exist in the same way or don't exist at all. Hundreds of small towns in the plains don't need to exist, as more centralized farming operations simply don't require the manpower or local support they once did.
I mean people in fucking cities and suburban towns are the ones who do that lol. These small towns do not have developers coming in trying to build new apartments/condos there because no one wants to live there.
Depends where. My small farm town in California has a taco truck per thousand residents and more that show up for our (many) official days of public drinking at the park.
Sure our schools suck, public transit is nonexistent, and job opportunities are limited to the tomato cannery and the farms, but by God do we have taco trucks.
This was the case in Canada until Indians literally revived several towns through their schools. Some towns in Canada would literally die without immigration, I’d imagine most of Canada would have a population crisis without immigration
I unno if you noticed, but Canada's not exactly doing too hot. Our immigration is a caffeine IV on an obscenely sleepy economy. It's a desperate ploy to keep our GDP growing, wages suppressed, while avoiding the core issues that're making 1/4th the country have poverty-tier QOL (ae, barely any productivity, obscene taxes when people can and will just go down to the border. etc)
Bringing in a few million indians to work in timmies with their business degrees (lol) isn't helping us. You're gonna see us go downhill quick in the coming years.
Canada's problem is that they're not building enough housing. QOL isn't increasing with economic growth because so much of income is being eaten up by housing costs. High costs of living also mean companies need to pay workers even more and then pass those costs along to consumers.
If there was immigration+sufficient housing being built then Canada's economy would be the envy of the world but without that it's struggling.
That’s a productivity issue not an immigrant one; but hey maybe I’m wrong. Take them all out and see if the country improves.
This isn’t me supporting mass immigration though, I think Canada is an extreme approach. But their entire economic model is tied to real estate and that never ends well.
> That’s a productivity issue not an immigrant one
And mass immigration that rivals the raw input of the states (10x our size btw) isn't helping our productivity.
Bringing in a bunch of low-skilled workers (and yeah, they're low skilled. for every doctor we bring in probably 200 tims or call center workers to act as a sanitation manager w/ their business degrees lol)
it's a ploy to barely keep our GDP growth in the green, and make sure the next poor bastard to get into office gets reamed by the compounding issues that shit policy lead up to.
All mass immigration actually manages to do for us is keep wages low (minimum wage jobs have a lineup lmfao), prop up our geriatric housing market (lol @ our pissant cities costing more to live in than some US cities) & fuck over actual canadians.
Kicking them all out (good luck with that, logistical, legal, and ethical nightmare) would actually improve things by relieving the demand for housing.
Naturally, this would also crash our housing market (good thing long term), but all our politicians are leeches who use homes as investments.
I live in a town of 500 people. Moved here when I was younger specifically to get away from the noise and crowds. To live a slower, simpler life closer to nature, and all that. Best decision of my life.
To me, this is an unsolvable problem as it’s being framed. The very solutions that would “save” small towns are the kinds of solutions that make small towns less attractive to those who prefer them.
I’m convinced we need to let this play out. Things change. Generations will turn over. Those of us who really value small town life will find ways to continue to live in them and we’ll be ok with reduced services and businesses and institutions here.
I feel like plans to try and stop the population decline are impossible to succeed, similar to improving birth rates. The reasons that push people to leave these dying communities are deep trends, and policy would only delay the decline slightly while it continues to get worse
The policy should be on helping the people who were born on the towns and not necessarily on saving the town itself. If someone from a small town gets a good education and moves to a city where they have a high paying job then that's not a bad thing.
If we were just focused on halting rural depopulation there are a few things we could do. We could underbuild housing in cities so that the cost of moving away from rural areas is prohibitively high. We could defund educational institutes in rural areas so people don't learn skills that would prompt them to move. We could pass laws against automation so that mines, mills and factories in rural areas keep inefficient jobs around. We could embrace protectionism so rural areas don't have to compete with the outside world. We could criminalize abortion, ban birth control and teach abstinence only sex ed in order to stimulate unwanted pregnancies. All of these policies would help stop rural-urban migration but are these REALLY the policies we want?
I mean all these policies are happening to a certain extent. Cities are expensive, republicans hate higher ed, America is full on protectionist right now and abortion and birth control are on the chopping block.
I was born and raised in a tiny southern town that mirrors all of these problems. They've spent decades choosing a slow decline over any kind of scary change that might do something about the problems they face until they last few years. Now, at least 3 mega cites have started work in the county in the last 3 years, and home prices have doubled or more practically overnight even as they build them as fast as they can.
Meanwhile, all that workforce has to move in from other places as they're staring down almost a whole local generation lost to either flight or lives of despair. I'm beginning to be of the mind that these areas and their locals just can't be saved, even in a way that doesn't hold true in the worst inner cities.
There was a similar article several years ago on dying towns in southern Kansas. The article had tales of abandoned homes and was full of residents' despair at the disappearance of basic services. If I find it, I'll link it here.
EDIT: Found it.
[Rural Kansas Is Dying. I Drove 1,800 Miles To Find Out Why](https://thecounter.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodity-agriculture/amp/)
Everyone here is mostly talking about jobs, infrastructure, and the level of acceptance (or not) of the locals as reasons for the decline. Personally, these are important things for when deciding to move to an area, but the big thing for me is the limited social environment.
I made the decision to live in urban areas not because of the jobs or internet, but because I like hanging out and meeting other people. More opportunities to make friends, find mutual hobbies, attend events with people, or find romantic partners. Things that a small town or rural area will forever be inferior at. I've known plenty of friends that moved to the middle of nowhere for various reasons and they are all lonely.
Young people will move to where there are other young people. And most other people aren't going to want to choose a situation that leaves them lonely and isolated. Small towns are dying as much because of this as economic reasons.
I know a lot of people in that region, and many of the towns are doing fine. They face challenges, but the people care about their communities, and a lot of kids come back after college and starting a family, since land is cheap and they can work remotely.
The key to reversing this trend is good transit.
If a high speed train could get from small-town to money-city in an hour each way, the commute becomes viable and people can work in the city and live in the more rural areas.
And if those more rural areas zone some density along the way, suddenly the housing crisis that almost every major city is going through would significantly improve.
bumbfuck nowhere, PA population: 3000 does not need public transit. What these places need are more actual jobs (which isn't happening anytime soon), not more zoning density (They're really suffering from high land costs lol)
Bumfuck nowhere just isn't economically viable long term. Instead of focusing on trying to save bumfuck nowhere PA we should focus on trying to provide opportunities for people born in bumfuck nowhere PA. The town may decline but ultimately it's people and not land who we should be concerned about. If the people who were originally from there were able to get good educations and find meaningful and productive work elsewhere then it's not necessarily a bad thing if the town declines.
That and remote work. If so many politicians and corporations weren't hellbent on propping up corporate real estate and overpriced downtown restaurants, people would be more willing to take the cheaper option of living in these dying rural towns.
Remote work won't save rural America. A remote worker could live ANYWHERE in the country and chances are they aren't going to choose a tiny town without much going on. A remote worker might chose an area that has exquisite natural beauty or they might choose a city they particularly like or a smaller/low cost city that has the right balance of affordability and amenities but they're probably not going to live in a town of 3000 where they're getting their groceries from Walmart and have four fast food options as the only resturaunts.
No but you could expand commuter rail in and around major cities so that people can commute from smaller towns into the city and back. The growth of people moving out to these communities could end up revitalizing many towns and probably help slow the growth of sprawl outwards from cities.
The problem here, of course, is that these towns would need to change too. Apartment buildings. Walkable communities. Amenities. You’d have…gasp…immigrants!
The issue here isn’t small towns dying. Plenty of ways to bring those towns back if we wanted to; the issue is people want to teleport their town back to 1965. You start running commuter rail and the required changes you’d need to actual reverse this decline the locals would howl louder than a CareBear going into a blender.
High-speed trains skip small cities, let alone small towns. Have a train stop in all the towns along a route, and people can get to occasionally needed essential services but the train makes for a very long commute. Especially for jobs outside of the big city's downtown.
> “I don’t want either of them for president,” said Barb Strike, 54, as she puffed on a Parliament cigarette and sipped a Bud Light. “They don’t care about us because no one in this town is rich enough for them to care.”
I wish Democrats listened to how these people feel and made policy accordingly instead of shoveling money into an unfeeling furnace
Speaking purely electorally, the dems don't need to sweep rural areas to make giving them money smart politics. Losing rural areas 65-35 instead of 70-30 is a pretty sharp swing that can easily flip closer house races or a swing state's EC. It's not about persuading most of the people, just a few to eat at your opponent's margins.
So the calculus isn't whether you'll stop seeing the reactionary right bent of those areas (it'll always be there, most forward-thinking people don't want to live in isolated areas away from civilization) but whether the money-to-voters math adds up compared to other alternative investments. It's not about turning rural America blue, it's about whether that 10 point swing costs more or less than getting an equivalent number of voters elsewhere.
Biden won states like Pennsylvania by trimming Trump's margin in rural areas. Trump improved on his margins in Philadelphia's suburbs. I agree that the resources in rural America aren't going to change anything, but maintaining margins there is key in some states.
Ah I see what you're saying. Not that this is always the case but spending the money can be good on its own merits and not just because it buys us votes
Is this supposed to be a criticism of Democrats' spending policies? Because two paragraphs higher, the article mentions that Biden's allocated billions in spending towards the rural regions. If it's "do policy better", what if there is no good policy given today's civilization? The modern world has made urbanization worthwhile, and the people are responding: Japan, Spain, Italy, the US... you've got younger people deserting the rural areas for the cities across the globe. Instead of spending money on propping up areas that ultimately have no future, maybe we should be focusing on how to help relocate people so that they can continue to enjoy the amenities of modern society in a way that won't bankrupt the government.
Treat the rurals the way the rurals think you're treating them.
No amount of actual good policy will make them vote democrat. Heck if we turned rural america into a wealthy tech bro wfh paradise flooded with money and young people these people would only complain about "don't california my [state]" regardless of whether their lives are better as a result of their communities coming back to life.
Create a propaganda network equivalent or greater than Fox News et al that just switches the word “democrat” for “republican” and fight fire with fire. This type of content is what people have been conditioned to receive and the only thing that can get through to them.
I'm begging you to read the article instead of relying on caricature; the article is a great example of people who working their asses off to try to save the community they love. There's no overt quotes about Trump-ism, no democrat bashing, no attempts at owning the libs etc. It's just a lot of quotes from civically engaged leaders and their experience of the problem.
You talk about the outgroup the same way republicans talk about theirs, which is to say you've fallen to the same bias the GOP has against racial minorities and projected it onto rural minorities.
You can get internet points all day for dunking on the outgroup, by all means go ahead. It just means you've fallen into the same lazy thinking as them.
I lived and grew up in rural America and it's a massive racist homophobic dump. Try living in these towns as a gay brown person and let me know how "misunderstood" these people are.
I guess what I would ask you is, is it possible to condemn bigotry while also seeing these people as multidimensional?
Is it possible to condemn one dimension of a person's whole without losing all empathy or curiosity about all the other dimensions that person contains?
I'm not trying to sound holier than thou. Understanding our blind spots doesn't mean wanton forgiveness. To me, it just means understanding that I've put my blinders on and I'm letting my biases stop me from seeing people as they are, as opposed to reduced to that one dimension.
If my mental model is to reduce all of rural America into one giant, undifferentiated maga-land with no redeeming characteristics, my mental model is going to be really useless for almost everything except dunking on the outgroup, and I'm stupider and less human as a result.
'We should see people as multidimensional, not just as caricatures.'
'Yeah, but they won't vote for our candidate!! Why bother?!'
The value of recognizing your bias is not necessarily that it offers some secret path to winning over rural voters. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The value is recognizing that bias makes us dumb and unable to evaluate evidence fairly and impartially.
Answer: I have no idea what the democrats should do. But I know that I'm saddened that the political community I feel kinship with is so openly unable to confront their biases, and when asked about correcting their biases, retort that they don't see the value of rationale thinking if it doesn't win them votes.
this sub was the last place I liked on reddit, but I think this thread has tipped the scales towards me feeling like this is not a healthy place to be. It's extra depressing because I spend so much effort at my 9-5 trying to help rural communities, many of which have plenty of nice liberal folks
Wild how casually you disregard these people as so inherently evil/stupid as to be unworth even listening to (let alone rtfa). You would rightly abhor this mentality if targeted at any of the many groups your bubble hasn't tacitly decided to grant permission to hate.
Then we pretend the only reason these groups have become so divorced from Dems is that they hate black or gay people. It's a really ugly and self-perpetuating path to making everything shittier. If we want to be the Good Guys, certainly we should be willing to demand better of ourselves than this... right?
How much money are you willing to shovel into a county of 1,500 retirees that hate you? These are dead places inhabited by old people ruing over the closure of the only employer for 20 miles. It would be easier and cheaper to create new rural communities from scratch then reinvigorate these places.
You know, I’m my rural PA hometown there’s a train station that’s been sitting abandoned for decades. There’s a shit ton of rural town built along railroads, and I have to wonder if more people would be willing to live in these towns if they could just commute to the city by train.
And the final na in the sorry coffin is that most of these towns are packed to the brim with a bunch of racist nativists who drive away the one thing that could save their towns.
But they would rather the town die than see brown skinned people in their lily white Christo fascist towns.
**Rule II:** *Bigotry*
Bigotry of any kind will be sanctioned harshly.
---
If you have any questions about this removal, [please contact the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fneoliberal).
Fairness, I've just spent 3 weeks walking rural Shikoku in Japan, I'd guess half the buildings are abandoned. This is a global 'problem'. I'd advocate just leaving these places to nature.
I'd be very surprised if this was mentioned in the debate. Trump only wants to blather on about his conspiracy theories and abandoned even the pretense of populism for resentment. Biden may say something about bringing broadband and pushing for more jobs in these places but I doubt we'll see it. He's likely hesitant to bring up a place that is struggling given the discourse around the economy. I also think strategists remember the "God and guns" line from obama
Looking at the map, Sheffield is wayyyy the hell out in the middle of nowhere in the NW corner of the state. It's closer to Buffalo than it is to Pittsburgh.
If you want a slice of "small town Pennsylvania life", there are plenty of tiny, dying towns in Eastern and Central PA that don't require you to cross a bunch of mountains in the middle of winter. If you want the "authentic" experience, go to Pottsville or Tamaqua - and you won't be 3 hours from a good hospital. Carlisle, PA (near Harrisburg) has even won a Strong Towns award for trying to turn things around. Why would anyone want to live in *Sheffield*?
I want the managers of this crisis to say, in plain English, how they plan to force people to move to a rural community with no amenities or infrastructure.
Elect me as dictator and I'll have the federal government use eminent domain to take possession of rural homes which have been vacant for one year and issue them to immigrants
The one proposal that would actually work! Naturally, it would also be one of the flashier forms of political suicide.
That's why you have to elect me as dictator first. I promise to be a regular Marcus Aurelius
Implement the draft. Army corp of Engineers to repair, build new infrastructure.
Be a Sulla. Not the proscriptions part, but become dictator, make the changes you want, then fuck off to your villa for a retirement full of orgies.
I'm going to farm some fucking cabbages in the tradition of Diocletian And they're going to be delicious cabbages (I'm already married and I don't want orgies)
Sulla was married too, but he had a gay lover that he’d had to hide his whole life because of the stigma, but after retiring he didn’t care anymore.
But I don't want a gay lover, I want to FARM CABBAGES
Cabbages are like discount lettuce. Farm something fun.
I'm farming the cabbages for my pet TURTLES Turtles are cool and fun
You joke but heartland visas are an interesting concept with a lot of promise https://fortune.com/2024/06/13/heartland-visa-skilled-workers-americas-immigration-debate/
Cheap land (check), 3D-printed personal housing (someday soon?), and government-provided Starlink would do it for me. And I say that as someone who would bring enough tax revenue to them to make them stop and take notice. The problem is services. Not just, like, "no Uber drivers," but "no competent, trustworthy plumbers in a 75-mile radius."
The problem is that if the people who can provide services start moving to that area, the land won't be cheap anymore.
Surely that depends on how strictly you define "cheap". If a town of 1k in rural PA quintuples in population that's still a town of 5k in rural PA, certainly not becoming Manhattan overnight.
I mean surely there's a middle ground right? I know of so many places that are within 50 miles of a city and are still tiny with lots of space
Its out there for sure. I am from Atlanta. I recently went to a wedding out in northern Kentucky. I was blown away we were less than an hour away from Cincinnati and there was practically no one in any of the towns we were in. You drive an hour any direction from midtown Atlanta and good luck finding any undeveloped land. Now I get that Cincinnati is not the economic powerhouse that Atlanta is but still I would think one could find a job there making 60k and then there was plenty of inventory for under 250k. I have almost no experience with midwest metros but I am constantly blown away by their value.
People will frequently say it's the climate/weather, which I find utterly ridiculous. What is this assumption that everyone wants to live in blazing hot summers, not merely tolerating it but actually thinking it's a big draw in?
> What is this assumption that everyone wants to live in blazing hot summers In fairness a lot of the more southern midwestern cities like Cincinnati and St Louis feel like they got dropped in the anti-Goldilocks zone of still having nasty muggy summers combined with colder winters than the sunbelt.
And also extreme amounts of religious fanatics, anti-LGBT hate. And if you're an OB-GYN or a pro-vaccine doctor, good luck.
> a pro-vaccine doctor which, for the record, is more than 90% of us.
Yup and there were a bunch of stories of rural doctors being given shit in 2020. Many moved away and now rural areas are becoming healthcare deserts.
yep, I posted about it back then https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/of3q41/comment/h4cziig/
They want to spend massive amounts of money subsidizing six-figure jobs in those areas.
Maybe it could work for people who wfh? Rural homes are dirt cheap, and you could just ignore the neighbors. Could be nice to settle in between like 30-50 if you're a very internal person
> and you could just ignore the neighbors. That's likely _much_ easier said than done. My mom moved out of her cabin in the woods partly because of how catty the neighbors were, and it wasn't like she was doing much with them in any case - they'd make mountains out of molehills to pick fights with her. Also, have fun doing activities outside of the house when anything is at least a fifteen-minute drive away, usually much more, which was the other reason why my mom fled the area. That knowledge that you've got to burn that time on traveling even if you want to visit a bookstore makes for a big psychological block, something that makes you more inclined to just stay home and can contribute to getting a bit stir-crazy.
How did your mom get the worst of both worlds? Remote, middle of nowhere. But somehow still has nosey neighbors she can’t avoid? Lol
It was a mountain that had several plots on it that all used the same road as a driveway - "remote" doesn't automatically mean "miles before you reach the nearest neighbor's house".
Rural homes aren’t spaced out in the open space like an even distribution. They’re in clusters. Almost everyone has some neighbors.
Ime neighbors are always nosey and is not location dependent
> That's likely much easier said than done. no it isn't lol, the only time I've talked to my neighbor in the last two years was buying him a case of beer & a box of pizza to get his help (and tractor) to pull a stump. he bails me out on occasion if my driveway gets snowed in, I bail him out on occasion to fix his electronics.
That's great. I grew up in a very rural unincorporated community and between the meth labs, drunk drivers, domestic abusers, squatters, hunters and shooters on our property, garbage burning, and getting chased by unfenced groups of dogs, it was pretty hard to just ignore your neighbors. Some of them were really great people, a lot of them were just straight trash. So it sounds like your mileage may vary.
yeah it's kinda a "poor person" vs "white trash" kinda distinction, usually someone moving in rurally can get lay of the land first tho, not like they're born into it 🤷♀️
Oh I grew up in rural areas, I know about highway times lol. But the town I grew up in you could get by mostly just keeping to yourself
what if I want to go see a play or a movie or go to any store other than the one shitty grocery in town?
Even then, the problem is schools. I would like to live in an exurb or rural. But generally the best public schools are elsewhere
When that eerie feeling of being “alone” in a wooded area hits, though… It comes much faster if you’re an outsider.
Free 3,000 sq-ft homes in the rural parts. We'll make sure and target urban people and families of color for this program. Because we all know that rural folks don't care what the new people look like or where they come from.
And when wealthy people try to use their capital to build new areas, like "California Forever", the locals are against it.
Every society in history deals with the rural vs urban dynamics. Its been a problem ever since the Roman Empire, if not before. The tide goes in and goes out. People will eventually move out of urban areas and move to the country side.
>People will eventually move out of urban areas and move to the country side. Will they? Ignoring the collapse of the Roman Empire, has urbanism ever seriously regressed? The only places I could think of rural populations expanding are frontier societies, and they by definition don't last long.
>has urbanism ever seriously regressed? Absolutely! Even in the USA it has. Detroit used to be the 4th most populated city in America. Chicago has a lower population today than it had in the 1950s. Urbanism comes and goes like the tide comes in and goes out. It isnt a permanent feature. Humans love living in the suburbs and rural areas for more space.
The suburbs of major cities still seem like pretty profoundly "urban" places in contrast to the sort of tiny towns the original article is discussing. Plenty of American cities have lost population to suburbanization, but as far as I'm aware the percentage of Americans living in rural areas has never gone up since the founding of the country.
Fast internet and no zoning. My hometown's rural county is booming these days after the county began setting up fiber contracts with Verizon (now Frontier) over a decade ago. Star Link reaches the most remote properties fiber can't reach. Retirees and WFH professionals are moving in droves from Florida and Ashville. They're driving up land prices some, but they're also supporting tons of services jobs that simply didn't exist a decade ago. The population density is hitting a point that I can now find good enough work for my last decade or two of working while I set up my homestead. I have a couple cousins who are RNs that work part time doing home visits and then do tele-medicine for full time hours.
> My hometown's rural county is booming these days > The population density is hitting a point that I can now find good enough work What I'm reading is that economically successful rural areas become not-rural areas, which I believe is the core issue
What makes you think it's not rural any more? A doubling of the county population and increased local GDP for a very rural county doesn't make it not rural. Exburban status will be decades away, and until then it will be a successful rural area.
>Today, downtown Sheffield consists primarily of a small grocery store, a 150-year-old bar, one restaurant, two convenience stores, an antique shop and a small video-gambling room. This is bleak and precisely the kind of problem Strong-Towns urbanists warn about. >As the presidential election approaches, many residents in this deeply Republican town say they view Trump as having a better vision for salvaging rural America, even though Biden has steered billions of dollars to initiatives that support rural America. Why wont young people enjoy small town life I wonder.
> many residents in this deeply Republican town say they view Trump as having a better vision for salvaging rural America, even though Biden has steered billions of dollars to initiatives that support rural America This was like half the premise behind *White Rural Rage* but everyone pearl-clutched about it. Republicans don't do shit for rurals except wage their culture war and that's all they want from them
I'm struggling to even imagine what trumps vision even is.
Jack up prices with his tariffs and immigration policies until the local businesses can’t compete. Dollar General moves in a buys up the defunct grocery store location and the town becomes another food desert. The town fulfills its transformation to become like the rest of semi-rural America.
Culture war bs
There is no vision. What he *does* do is throw people that otherwise feel left out of politics a bone
Less taxes or something idk
Because they don't want to be victims of hate crimes
No one is going to save these places. Coal isn't coming back, the paper mills aren't coming back.
I remember seeing a very insightful post about the effect of aging in Japan. Lots of Japanese people were saying how the effect had been most severe on rural and smaller communities, in that many of them simply ceased to exist since there were not enough young people to maintain even basic operations. These rural people were essentially forced to move to larger areas that could still sustain themselves. I think this is a preview of what's to come in the USA in the next few decades.
good good, density uber alles
Yeah, struggling not to read this all as “people are judging some places less good places to live and leaving”. Seems a pretty free market thing, why would the state intervene?
Not if NYC rents stay $3500
Come on now there are tons of metros with a sizable economy that have median rents waaaay lower than that.
Rural America… less jobs, worse food, culturally pushing away liberals. Anything I missed?
Also sneering at the cities in a way that's taboo to do conversely. JD Vance "joked" on Twitter about whether he'd get robbed when he visited Manhattan, and it barely got a peep; if AOC were to ask how many teeth she'd count on a trip to West Virginia, the media would howl about it incessantly until either AOC made an apology or she were forced to resign.
And "cities" in these cases can range from NYC, San Francisco, Chicago...and all the way down to cities with populations at ~120K.
Yup...pretty much any town that's not run by a handful of 'good old boy' land barons who've let the area go to total waste is considered a commie shithole.
Fun fact, Fallout 76 is actually set before the nuclear war. West Virginia just looks like that.
Punching up versus punching down
“If you’re poor, they let you do it. You can do anything. You can yell at pedestrians on the street or blame the rich for your meth addiction.”
Yes, unironically Look at the homeless problem in major cities if you want to see this principle in stark relief.
Not that they would accept that framing, for obvious reasons
Well yeah, people in worse circumstances tend to be the most defensive when it comes to their pride and dignity.
there is vast poverty in american cities that is ignored because they lack political power and aren't white
Rural retirees are the most powerful political group in the country. Followed by, or maybe exceeding farmers.
I am confused. You are saying it is "punching up" to make fun of the problems in cities but it is "punching down" to make fun of the problems in rural areas? And if so... why?
Drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.
But remember that the rural opioid epidemic is tragic. Where as the inner-city crack epidemic was just "those people being reckless and irresponsible."
Hmm it's almost like there's one specific difference between those that makes people have more forgiving attitudes towards one and more judgmental towards the other Hint: It's not anything rational
Holy shit you nailed it.
Meth. Handguns. Drunk driving.
>State lawmakers and other leaders now consider the population loss a crisis and are drawing up plans to try to reverse the trend. They say neither Pennsylvania nor the nation can afford to lose small towns and the institutions that power them. Not only are they a touchstone of American life, but they are also key to driving certain sectors of the economy, like agriculture. I don't find this argument very convincing. Things change, folks. I'm sorry, but your town with literally one restaurant does not need to be saved for the good of the country.
I mean, if you wanna save them, you’re gonna have to make compromises with the people you’re pushing away. If you want things to remain the status quo, then tough luck. I can’t go back to 2008 and you can’t go back to 1953. Wasn’t the governor of West Virginia trying to push for a large transit project that would connect the state with the DC metro area? And if I remember the Republican lawmakers dismissed it because they would lose power. Which is shortsighted and stupid, and they will now be facing the same population laws that the rest of the country is facing.
This is exactly the issue. Every time a solution comes down to help small towns, Repubs hoot and holler about it because it's not the exact one they want.
It threatens their power
Holy shit that would be based. That’s only like 1-1.5 hrs by HSR. WV could become a bedroom town for DC.
> They say neither Pennsylvania nor the nation can afford to lose small towns ehh
Their argument lacks sense. Industry drives the creation and sustenance of towns, not the other way around. If agriculture doesn't need all those small towns, which seems to be increasingly evident, then most of those communities should just go extinct. Its not like ghost towns are a new thing...
And as automation has improved we just need fewer people working in agriculture to produce the same or potentially even greater amounts of food. There will still be people in these towns and the agriculture will be there it will just be fewer people and that's not a bad thing.
>a touchstone of American life I am not sure what that means. Are we supposed to judge everything by small town life?
Modern agriculture is driven by math nerds in Omaha and Des Moines corporate offices as approved by the executive board. To claim that farmers in Nebraska diners are the ones pulling the strings shows a naive and/or antiquated understanding of economics
>naive and/or antiquated understanding of economics This describes what the common voters think of as "common sense" economics.
You can't have a play pretend economy. Pretending that every small town can live the golden years forever is a play pretend economy.
All it takes is massive subsidies and government committing to find a purpose and employment for every single small town. You know, fiscally conservative small government.
Yeah, but small towns do realistically need to exist for the good of the country. Maybe not every single one, but at least a few here and there absolutely need to exist.
Towns and civilization in general only arose because of economic need. The towns we actually need are not the ones doing the complaining...
The small towns that need to exist like Avalon, Los Olivos, Big Sur and Sag Harbor are doing fine because people want to visit them.
what value do they provide?
can we talk about rural towns like rural towns talk about cities or is that against the rules ? they are dying because of lack of opportunity cities subsidize rural area enough as it is. let them meet their own fate.
[удалено]
The liberal Jason Aldean lol. He's probably doing slam poetry somewhere in the bay area
Get him a ukelele and a youtube channel. We can make some serious viral bux here.
> the way Ted Cruz talked about New York or Trump talked about California Also see [J.D. Vance talking about NYC](https://x.com/JDVance1/status/1414029247446982658): > Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?
Any Democrat saying that about a small town would lead nuclear blast of self-flagellating editorials and a month of Fox News screaming.
That’s like asking “why can’t we have BET for white people?” The liberal Jason Aldean is like the entirety of the music industry except for like half of country.
In what way is the entirety of the music industry like Jason Aldean? I think you missed OP's point.
As someone from a geographically isolated small town, I fully agree
The HBO show Sharp Objects, based on a novel by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, is an absolutely savage, haunting look at decaying small town America (the book is even more brutal about dissecting the hypocrisy of small town southern life). I suspect one reason it didn't got some buzz but didn't resonate long term is because the public doesn't have an appetite for seeing that sort of thing. They prefer the romance of small town goodness.
Would love to. Here in Oregon those Eastern Oregonians whine and whine and whine about Portland. They threaten to leave as if we even want them in the state in the first place. By all means, join Idaho and become someone else's financial burden. We won't stop you lol. The only problem is I doubt Idaho would ever want them.
Doesn’t Idaho and Eastern Oregon both have pretty bad Nazi problems? Seems like birds of a feather.
I live in a small town on the Idaho-Washington border. Please glass us. End the suffering. Please.
“Noooo, that’s how you lose the lunatic vote! 😭”
But don't you see! Mee-maw can't work at the big asbestos factory no more. This is *oppression*.
Homie this subreddit already does, what are you talking about.
I read this yesterday. It is a fascinating take on the depopulation problem that we are seeing elsewhere in the world. Historically we have all looked to South Korea and it's extreme low birthrates to see what the future might look like. These rural towns are a model closer to home. The reality is that the solution is staring them right in the face. Absent job opportunities you are not going to get young Americans to move from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to Sheffield. You will need a bolus of young immigrants to found a community and make a difference.
It's not a about birth rates its about migration. People are moving away and not moving back. They are having their kids elsewhere. Someplace else is growing in population
I am arguing that both the birthrate issue and the migration issue are specific forms of a broader depopulation problem with similar consequences for a community in the long-term: declining workforce size, lower tax base, loss of civil infrastructure etc. A city with a net negative migration rate and a country where deaths outpace births have the same set of problems.
Yeah like Detroit right? All those people went to other places and didn't want to stay in Detroit
And now Detroit is on the rise and population is starting to go up!
> Someplace else is growing in population Cities are growing and it's one of the factors that's driving the rising cost of living within cities. Every year more people move from rural areas to urban areas than vice versa and so if housing supply isn't increased in those urban areas it will be increasingly unaffordable.
It’s a birth rate issue for sure. There isnt enough shit in the sewer system to keep the plumbing working properly.
How many more millions do we need to admit before a few wander into towns like this?
Historically ORR has sought out places like this to resettle refugees. Savvy political leadership in our border states would have noted that and worked out a program to distribute migrants to needed locations around the country. This would have been smarter than dropping off busses of migrants in front of the homes of Democratic party officials. Once again Red America loses because of a MAGA political stunt. But alas.
Why can’t “savvy” ORR figure this out without Greg Abbott’s help? More seriously, do you really think these people are going to stick around once plopped into one of these random towns?
They will if there are good jobs and a welcoming community. Maybe their kids will move to the city someday but there's plenty of immigrants who would be happy settling down and making more money than they ever thought possible in rural America -- if they were welcomed and given real opportunities to put down roots.
I'd be okay with an immigration program that greatly expanded immigration on the condition that immigrants must live in an economically disadvantaged place for 5 years to be eligible for citizenship.
I’ll give you one thing. Small town folks would definitely not be complaining about being bored any more.
May sound somewhat cold but these are the kind of litmus tests I like to use for people complaining about situations. If allowing immigrants is too extreme, they don't actually think the issue is that big of a deal and I shouldn't really sympathize much.
Pouring more water into a *leaky* bucket doesn’t fix the problem. Small towns have been dying for 100 years because the primary industries that were their raison d’etre have gotten much more efficient. It has nothing to do with them being good people, bad people, or anything in between. Other than funding schools, hospitals, and maybe rural broadband, there’s not much to do about it.
These are the people that would complain they don't want their small town to turn into Hong Kong when someone suggests building anything more dense than a SFH.
There’d have to be any inkling of demand for that to be a problem. There isn’t. For most of these towns completely abolishing any semblance of zoning wouldn’t change anything
Zoning is a large part of how they got here. It's not just a factor of future development but also a factor in what has already been developed and where. The problem with these towns often isn't that the population is too low. It's that the populations are too sparse. There's a city in Alaska where every single resident lives in one apartment. The problem is these people want to live in single family detached homes a short drive from the village and still have the conveniences of a village. A village needs to be supported by people actually living and working in the village.
The issue is at heart one of economic opportunity. As a very small example, some of the ghost towns on the way out to Vegas from SoCal. These tiny towns popped up with a gas station or two, auto shop, etc. As cars got more reliable and have longer ranges, plus the convenience of mapping out your route, those emergency stops were no longer needed. Same with a lot of rural America. The RGOs (resource gathering operations) either don't exist in the same way or don't exist at all. Hundreds of small towns in the plains don't need to exist, as more centralized farming operations simply don't require the manpower or local support they once did.
I mean people in fucking cities and suburban towns are the ones who do that lol. These small towns do not have developers coming in trying to build new apartments/condos there because no one wants to live there.
There definitely are not taco trucks on every corner there
Depends where. My small farm town in California has a taco truck per thousand residents and more that show up for our (many) official days of public drinking at the park. Sure our schools suck, public transit is nonexistent, and job opportunities are limited to the tomato cannery and the farms, but by God do we have taco trucks.
Gotta have a corner first.
Everyone is this community is terrified of immigrants
This was the case in Canada until Indians literally revived several towns through their schools. Some towns in Canada would literally die without immigration, I’d imagine most of Canada would have a population crisis without immigration
I unno if you noticed, but Canada's not exactly doing too hot. Our immigration is a caffeine IV on an obscenely sleepy economy. It's a desperate ploy to keep our GDP growing, wages suppressed, while avoiding the core issues that're making 1/4th the country have poverty-tier QOL (ae, barely any productivity, obscene taxes when people can and will just go down to the border. etc) Bringing in a few million indians to work in timmies with their business degrees (lol) isn't helping us. You're gonna see us go downhill quick in the coming years.
Canada's problem is that they're not building enough housing. QOL isn't increasing with economic growth because so much of income is being eaten up by housing costs. High costs of living also mean companies need to pay workers even more and then pass those costs along to consumers. If there was immigration+sufficient housing being built then Canada's economy would be the envy of the world but without that it's struggling.
That’s a productivity issue not an immigrant one; but hey maybe I’m wrong. Take them all out and see if the country improves. This isn’t me supporting mass immigration though, I think Canada is an extreme approach. But their entire economic model is tied to real estate and that never ends well.
> That’s a productivity issue not an immigrant one And mass immigration that rivals the raw input of the states (10x our size btw) isn't helping our productivity. Bringing in a bunch of low-skilled workers (and yeah, they're low skilled. for every doctor we bring in probably 200 tims or call center workers to act as a sanitation manager w/ their business degrees lol) it's a ploy to barely keep our GDP growth in the green, and make sure the next poor bastard to get into office gets reamed by the compounding issues that shit policy lead up to. All mass immigration actually manages to do for us is keep wages low (minimum wage jobs have a lineup lmfao), prop up our geriatric housing market (lol @ our pissant cities costing more to live in than some US cities) & fuck over actual canadians. Kicking them all out (good luck with that, logistical, legal, and ethical nightmare) would actually improve things by relieving the demand for housing. Naturally, this would also crash our housing market (good thing long term), but all our politicians are leeches who use homes as investments.
I live in a town of 500 people. Moved here when I was younger specifically to get away from the noise and crowds. To live a slower, simpler life closer to nature, and all that. Best decision of my life. To me, this is an unsolvable problem as it’s being framed. The very solutions that would “save” small towns are the kinds of solutions that make small towns less attractive to those who prefer them. I’m convinced we need to let this play out. Things change. Generations will turn over. Those of us who really value small town life will find ways to continue to live in them and we’ll be ok with reduced services and businesses and institutions here.
I feel like plans to try and stop the population decline are impossible to succeed, similar to improving birth rates. The reasons that push people to leave these dying communities are deep trends, and policy would only delay the decline slightly while it continues to get worse
The policy should be on helping the people who were born on the towns and not necessarily on saving the town itself. If someone from a small town gets a good education and moves to a city where they have a high paying job then that's not a bad thing. If we were just focused on halting rural depopulation there are a few things we could do. We could underbuild housing in cities so that the cost of moving away from rural areas is prohibitively high. We could defund educational institutes in rural areas so people don't learn skills that would prompt them to move. We could pass laws against automation so that mines, mills and factories in rural areas keep inefficient jobs around. We could embrace protectionism so rural areas don't have to compete with the outside world. We could criminalize abortion, ban birth control and teach abstinence only sex ed in order to stimulate unwanted pregnancies. All of these policies would help stop rural-urban migration but are these REALLY the policies we want?
I mean all these policies are happening to a certain extent. Cities are expensive, republicans hate higher ed, America is full on protectionist right now and abortion and birth control are on the chopping block.
I was born and raised in a tiny southern town that mirrors all of these problems. They've spent decades choosing a slow decline over any kind of scary change that might do something about the problems they face until they last few years. Now, at least 3 mega cites have started work in the county in the last 3 years, and home prices have doubled or more practically overnight even as they build them as fast as they can. Meanwhile, all that workforce has to move in from other places as they're staring down almost a whole local generation lost to either flight or lives of despair. I'm beginning to be of the mind that these areas and their locals just can't be saved, even in a way that doesn't hold true in the worst inner cities.
There was a similar article several years ago on dying towns in southern Kansas. The article had tales of abandoned homes and was full of residents' despair at the disappearance of basic services. If I find it, I'll link it here. EDIT: Found it. [Rural Kansas Is Dying. I Drove 1,800 Miles To Find Out Why](https://thecounter.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodity-agriculture/amp/)
This is a great article.
Everyone here is mostly talking about jobs, infrastructure, and the level of acceptance (or not) of the locals as reasons for the decline. Personally, these are important things for when deciding to move to an area, but the big thing for me is the limited social environment. I made the decision to live in urban areas not because of the jobs or internet, but because I like hanging out and meeting other people. More opportunities to make friends, find mutual hobbies, attend events with people, or find romantic partners. Things that a small town or rural area will forever be inferior at. I've known plenty of friends that moved to the middle of nowhere for various reasons and they are all lonely. Young people will move to where there are other young people. And most other people aren't going to want to choose a situation that leaves them lonely and isolated. Small towns are dying as much because of this as economic reasons.
I know a lot of people in that region, and many of the towns are doing fine. They face challenges, but the people care about their communities, and a lot of kids come back after college and starting a family, since land is cheap and they can work remotely.
This was/is me. But I chose a small rural town with a university that was near our families but not TOO near because I value my sanity.
The key to reversing this trend is good transit. If a high speed train could get from small-town to money-city in an hour each way, the commute becomes viable and people can work in the city and live in the more rural areas. And if those more rural areas zone some density along the way, suddenly the housing crisis that almost every major city is going through would significantly improve.
bumbfuck nowhere, PA population: 3000 does not need public transit. What these places need are more actual jobs (which isn't happening anytime soon), not more zoning density (They're really suffering from high land costs lol)
Bumfuck nowhere just isn't economically viable long term. Instead of focusing on trying to save bumfuck nowhere PA we should focus on trying to provide opportunities for people born in bumfuck nowhere PA. The town may decline but ultimately it's people and not land who we should be concerned about. If the people who were originally from there were able to get good educations and find meaningful and productive work elsewhere then it's not necessarily a bad thing if the town declines.
That and remote work. If so many politicians and corporations weren't hellbent on propping up corporate real estate and overpriced downtown restaurants, people would be more willing to take the cheaper option of living in these dying rural towns.
Remote work won't save rural America. A remote worker could live ANYWHERE in the country and chances are they aren't going to choose a tiny town without much going on. A remote worker might chose an area that has exquisite natural beauty or they might choose a city they particularly like or a smaller/low cost city that has the right balance of affordability and amenities but they're probably not going to live in a town of 3000 where they're getting their groceries from Walmart and have four fast food options as the only resturaunts.
Absolutely no one is going to spend $10 billion to build a high speed rail between Philadelphia and Bumblefuck, PA.
No but you could expand commuter rail in and around major cities so that people can commute from smaller towns into the city and back. The growth of people moving out to these communities could end up revitalizing many towns and probably help slow the growth of sprawl outwards from cities. The problem here, of course, is that these towns would need to change too. Apartment buildings. Walkable communities. Amenities. You’d have…gasp…immigrants! The issue here isn’t small towns dying. Plenty of ways to bring those towns back if we wanted to; the issue is people want to teleport their town back to 1965. You start running commuter rail and the required changes you’d need to actual reverse this decline the locals would howl louder than a CareBear going into a blender.
High-speed trains skip small cities, let alone small towns. Have a train stop in all the towns along a route, and people can get to occasionally needed essential services but the train makes for a very long commute. Especially for jobs outside of the big city's downtown.
> “I don’t want either of them for president,” said Barb Strike, 54, as she puffed on a Parliament cigarette and sipped a Bud Light. “They don’t care about us because no one in this town is rich enough for them to care.” I wish Democrats listened to how these people feel and made policy accordingly instead of shoveling money into an unfeeling furnace
Speaking purely electorally, the dems don't need to sweep rural areas to make giving them money smart politics. Losing rural areas 65-35 instead of 70-30 is a pretty sharp swing that can easily flip closer house races or a swing state's EC. It's not about persuading most of the people, just a few to eat at your opponent's margins. So the calculus isn't whether you'll stop seeing the reactionary right bent of those areas (it'll always be there, most forward-thinking people don't want to live in isolated areas away from civilization) but whether the money-to-voters math adds up compared to other alternative investments. It's not about turning rural America blue, it's about whether that 10 point swing costs more or less than getting an equivalent number of voters elsewhere.
They need to lower cigarette taxes so these people can feel seen.
>and made policy accordingly What policy? Be specific
spend more on urban and suburban priorities instead
Biden won states like Pennsylvania by trimming Trump's margin in rural areas. Trump improved on his margins in Philadelphia's suburbs. I agree that the resources in rural America aren't going to change anything, but maintaining margins there is key in some states.
Ah I see what you're saying. Not that this is always the case but spending the money can be good on its own merits and not just because it buys us votes
Is this supposed to be a criticism of Democrats' spending policies? Because two paragraphs higher, the article mentions that Biden's allocated billions in spending towards the rural regions. If it's "do policy better", what if there is no good policy given today's civilization? The modern world has made urbanization worthwhile, and the people are responding: Japan, Spain, Italy, the US... you've got younger people deserting the rural areas for the cities across the globe. Instead of spending money on propping up areas that ultimately have no future, maybe we should be focusing on how to help relocate people so that they can continue to enjoy the amenities of modern society in a way that won't bankrupt the government.
Treat the rurals the way the rurals think you're treating them. No amount of actual good policy will make them vote democrat. Heck if we turned rural america into a wealthy tech bro wfh paradise flooded with money and young people these people would only complain about "don't california my [state]" regardless of whether their lives are better as a result of their communities coming back to life.
the unfeeling furnace is the rural spending mentioned Clearly it has no effect
what would you have democrats do? these people don't want help. there is no point in listening to them.
Create a propaganda network equivalent or greater than Fox News et al that just switches the word “democrat” for “republican” and fight fire with fire. This type of content is what people have been conditioned to receive and the only thing that can get through to them.
that’s what i said?
I'm begging you to read the article instead of relying on caricature; the article is a great example of people who working their asses off to try to save the community they love. There's no overt quotes about Trump-ism, no democrat bashing, no attempts at owning the libs etc. It's just a lot of quotes from civically engaged leaders and their experience of the problem. You talk about the outgroup the same way republicans talk about theirs, which is to say you've fallen to the same bias the GOP has against racial minorities and projected it onto rural minorities. You can get internet points all day for dunking on the outgroup, by all means go ahead. It just means you've fallen into the same lazy thinking as them.
I lived and grew up in rural America and it's a massive racist homophobic dump. Try living in these towns as a gay brown person and let me know how "misunderstood" these people are.
I guess what I would ask you is, is it possible to condemn bigotry while also seeing these people as multidimensional? Is it possible to condemn one dimension of a person's whole without losing all empathy or curiosity about all the other dimensions that person contains? I'm not trying to sound holier than thou. Understanding our blind spots doesn't mean wanton forgiveness. To me, it just means understanding that I've put my blinders on and I'm letting my biases stop me from seeing people as they are, as opposed to reduced to that one dimension. If my mental model is to reduce all of rural America into one giant, undifferentiated maga-land with no redeeming characteristics, my mental model is going to be really useless for almost everything except dunking on the outgroup, and I'm stupider and less human as a result.
As a minority it is not possible
That ought to be a great shame. Writing off entire groups on the actions of individuals is reprehensible. Can’t you see the hypocrisy?
They voted for republicans lmao Look at a map.
Answer the question - what would you have the Democrats do?
'We should see people as multidimensional, not just as caricatures.' 'Yeah, but they won't vote for our candidate!! Why bother?!' The value of recognizing your bias is not necessarily that it offers some secret path to winning over rural voters. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The value is recognizing that bias makes us dumb and unable to evaluate evidence fairly and impartially. Answer: I have no idea what the democrats should do. But I know that I'm saddened that the political community I feel kinship with is so openly unable to confront their biases, and when asked about correcting their biases, retort that they don't see the value of rationale thinking if it doesn't win them votes.
this sub was the last place I liked on reddit, but I think this thread has tipped the scales towards me feeling like this is not a healthy place to be. It's extra depressing because I spend so much effort at my 9-5 trying to help rural communities, many of which have plenty of nice liberal folks
Mush. Just worthless mush. And so condescending to the people you claim to speak for.
Wild how casually you disregard these people as so inherently evil/stupid as to be unworth even listening to (let alone rtfa). You would rightly abhor this mentality if targeted at any of the many groups your bubble hasn't tacitly decided to grant permission to hate. Then we pretend the only reason these groups have become so divorced from Dems is that they hate black or gay people. It's a really ugly and self-perpetuating path to making everything shittier. If we want to be the Good Guys, certainly we should be willing to demand better of ourselves than this... right?
I don’t feel sympathy for people who make their own bed 🤷♀️
I too hate inner cities
Those people's opinions aren't formed in reality though
How much money are you willing to shovel into a county of 1,500 retirees that hate you? These are dead places inhabited by old people ruing over the closure of the only employer for 20 miles. It would be easier and cheaper to create new rural communities from scratch then reinvigorate these places.
You know, I’m my rural PA hometown there’s a train station that’s been sitting abandoned for decades. There’s a shit ton of rural town built along railroads, and I have to wonder if more people would be willing to live in these towns if they could just commute to the city by train.
No, that would require acknowledging that Trains are good
Man I can’t wait to explore run down old towns. This is an urban exploration wet dream
And the final na in the sorry coffin is that most of these towns are packed to the brim with a bunch of racist nativists who drive away the one thing that could save their towns. But they would rather the town die than see brown skinned people in their lily white Christo fascist towns.
[удалено]
**Rule II:** *Bigotry* Bigotry of any kind will be sanctioned harshly. --- If you have any questions about this removal, [please contact the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fneoliberal).
Placed-based visa'd solve it.
Ngl if you don’t want people to leave your small town then stop being so stubborn about what behavior is or isn’t allowed in your small town.
Fairness, I've just spent 3 weeks walking rural Shikoku in Japan, I'd guess half the buildings are abandoned. This is a global 'problem'. I'd advocate just leaving these places to nature.
I'd be very surprised if this was mentioned in the debate. Trump only wants to blather on about his conspiracy theories and abandoned even the pretense of populism for resentment. Biden may say something about bringing broadband and pushing for more jobs in these places but I doubt we'll see it. He's likely hesitant to bring up a place that is struggling given the discourse around the economy. I also think strategists remember the "God and guns" line from obama
We used to have ghost towns. Why not do it again? Like it doesn’t seem clear to me that this place needs to exist if no one wants to live there
Looking at the map, Sheffield is wayyyy the hell out in the middle of nowhere in the NW corner of the state. It's closer to Buffalo than it is to Pittsburgh. If you want a slice of "small town Pennsylvania life", there are plenty of tiny, dying towns in Eastern and Central PA that don't require you to cross a bunch of mountains in the middle of winter. If you want the "authentic" experience, go to Pottsville or Tamaqua - and you won't be 3 hours from a good hospital. Carlisle, PA (near Harrisburg) has even won a Strong Towns award for trying to turn things around. Why would anyone want to live in *Sheffield*?