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Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
Don't worry they conveniently forgot too.
That plus other services like rural hospitals and education are huge drawbacks to living in most of rural America.
Also a bunch of other issues with small town living like lack of privacy/anonymity, entertainment, restaurants, government services, etc... And these problems get more severe the smaller the community.
But people really did spread out to smaller towns during COVID. Property values went crazy in a lot of small towns around me.
I live in a small mountain town, and property values went apeshit. Like a house/cabin that was $150-250k is now $4-500k. It's insane.
Privacy and anonymity is definitely still a thing as long as you keep you business to yourself, because as I'm guessing you're alluding to, people are pretty chatty as it is and a smaller population makes it more difficult. It also helps to not be an asshole and give people even more to talk about, especially when most everyone knows each other.
Even without direct interaction, it's easier to know someone as "the guy in the cabin on hillside road with the blue Honda CRV and the beard". I assume that's what the comment meant since they tied privacy to anonymity
I mean yeah, it's not uncommon to know where each other live, there's also that unspoken respect of leave people alone. Also yet another reason to not be an asshole in a small town lol.
Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
It's actually happened multiple times...
I remember two off the top of my head, but it's possible there was a couple more
European
As an American, it's because there's nothing out there. We have SO much land. A small town means you have to drive everywhere. It means the local grocery is 30 min away. It also means 300 people in the town, one library (maybe), but at least three churches. Very much not my vibe :-)
Not everywhere, obviously, but it's a thing.
I live in a city of over 100,000 people and my grocery store is 25 minutes away. About an hour if I walk.
I grew up in a small town and had two grocery stores within 8 minutes. Everything was a lot more expensive and there was less selection.
Moved because of the lack of services (no hospital, volunteer FD and ambulance, no high school, no college nearby, no taxi service, no bus service, everything shut down at 6 PM).
I feel you on that.
I live in a town of about 71,000 The nearest grocery store which is a little bit more expensive is seven minutes by car. The other one that’s a little bit less expensive is about 15 to 20 minutes by car.
Out of curiosity, what region are you in? I live in a city of ~80,000 in the northeastish US and I'm not even sure it's possible to be more than 5 or 10 minutes from a grocery store here.
West… there’s a lot more sprawl here AND rush hour traffic that lasts half the day, even on weekends.
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.
Smaller communities tend to skew towards conservatives, and there's little way to escape from it (due to the distances and the lack of high speed rail). So expect more religiosity, more discrimination, and politicians that are even shittier than the average.
Huh , i forgor about americans and their shit-frastracture ... im from europe and our villages/small towns are dying even tho most of what you said isnt true for us.
Idk whats it about , as most people my age (late 20s early 30s) want to live in a smaller town nearby but noone is moving there just staying in the big cities.
I think you need to specify your European country, because small French villages have awful infrastructure while their cities have amazing infrastructure.
But even here in the Netherlands, if I'd live in a village and I wanted to go to another village further away I'd need to take the train to the nearest city and then take another train to said village. This often takes much longer than by car. Also, while basic shopping needs like a supermarket, greengrocer and some basic repair shops might be there (maybe just the supermarket) you don't have access to... Anything else really, and need to take the car there, too. Sadly, necessary non-commercial facilities like hospitals and higher education are also missing from most villages here.
Yeah, even in the Randstad, for distances up to like 15 km it's often faster to cycle somewhere than take public transport.
Well, I lived in such conditions most of my adulthood before having a kid to care for, and it was possible precisely because it was just me. Either it was a small town not even close to a big city, or it was a small town at the outskirts of a big city, some 20-30km away. I loved it. Still do.
But it’s so hard to uproot once you have all the other stuff like not only your own job, but also your partner’s. And kid’s school or daycare or whatever. And then having to work out the bus routes for the small humans and figure whether or not it’d be plausible for them to adjust to that and not get burned out or lost or confused or whatever.
And once you need more space, it’s much harder to find places to rent in the small towns. Mostly for sale, if it’s beyond two bedrooms. And in that case it’s much more complicated since you need to go to the effort of getting the place evaluated, arranging the loans and finances so you can pull it off, and that’s a big decision since it’ll probably lock you in there for quite some while, because small towns don’t move houses fast if you decide to go, so you could be looking at years before you get the sale done and another mortgage.
It’s just so hard. Once you are in the city, it’s hard to leave. And the more you root in the city, the harder it gets.
I hate it. I hate the city. I hate most about it.
But I love my family and would suffer in a city until my death if that’s what it takes to keep it together.
But as a positive anecdote, in my life prior to rooting down, as a younger and more adventurous human, I found that maintaining a community and a good group of friends even somewhat far away from the rest of them is easy and most importantly, comes easy. Its natural. I never found community a problem, because I always had a few groups of friends and it was always enough for us to touch ground together only monthly or every other month, so our location wasn’t really a concern. Most of us lived apart anyway. And the actual day-to-day sense of community came from work or uni or that kind of thing. I was never alone, though I lived blissfully far from most everyone.
So the only thing that really makes it difficult is trying to find a way and a good timing for not only one, but three+ people to move at once with all of them being happy with it. That’s a puzzle I’ve found near impossible to crack.
If we had a lot of money saved or good enough jobs to get a nest egg going, the problems likely wouldn’t matter and could very easily be worked around. But alas, we are just lower middle class, and while we are well enough off, moving is a completely life changing and paradigm shifting thing. It’s not something to choose lightly.
Maybe that plays a part within your group of acquaintances too? My work is even WFM and my partner could likely commute easily from most of the options we have within 100km. So technically we have a lot going for it. Should be easier.
But it’s not. Life is complex.
Edit: For context, I’m in Europe too.
I don't drive. Where I live, you can really only "not drive" in cities. And even then, it can be hard at times.
At the same time, I live within reasonable commuting distance of multiple friends and family members. I can walk to a few of them. I don't need to be closer to my community.
I might want to retire someplace quieter, but I like being able to hop on a train or a bus to get to somewhere fun, or to be able to walk across the street to a store if I need something. Heck, I can even easily get takeout if I don't feel like cooking -- I don't even need delivery.
I'm weird as fuck. Other people who are as weird as fuck as me are possible to be found, but a small community makes it unlikely if not impossible. People as weird as me can only really be found in a big enough place with enough people.
And yeah, there's also just much more to do than in a smaller town. Taking 30-45 minutes to arrive at something you wanna do is a significant hurdle compared to 5-10 minutes.
I've personally been thriving since moving to a big city. I never want to go back to the middle of nowhere. I enjoy urban exploration, I love the diversity of business and people, and I love the sheer amount of community that exists. I love that there's always new things to find. That just doesn't exist outside of cities.
Infintevalence pretty much nailed it
We're country as fuck up here. Not a small town any more, but still more rural than suburban.
While we're in driving distance of a good hospital, it's a drive, not something in town. There's just not enough people to keep a hospital in use often enough to make it reasonable in a capitalist system at all, but even in an ideal, post scarcity system, the resources to build and run hospitals are going to be best located where the most people can benefit from it.
And pretty much everything scales the same. Why locate a big university in a town with maybe 10k people if you include outlying areas? To support that kind of endeavor, you'd need more people to do the work, so the town would get bigger because of the large undertaking.
It's a balance. If you want to have bigger centralized services, you need more people to make it work. And, if you don't already have the population, attracting bigger things is harder, so the chances of things like public transit, resource intensive facilities, exotic supplies/foods coming there are lower.
It results in people that value the benefits of a smaller population center over the usual benefits of a bigger center being the only ones that'll move out
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.
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 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.
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.
The career opportunities for my partner's career are basically only available in this region of our country.
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.
TL;DR: capitalism.
I’ve put some thought into this and I don’t have a good answer other than because of how society is designed to keep us from doing it now.
Evolutionarily speaking, we are designed to thrive in smaller communities. It’s only in the more recent part of humanity that we seem to have moved away from that. I mean, there were still cities a long time ago, but within them were what could be thought of as smaller communities.
I myself am of European descent, but currently live in a place where there is a thriving native community and realizing that I sometimes have envy of some of their ways of life is what got me thinking.
For instance, in western society becoming elderly is almost seen as a problem, like a burden that needs to be “dealt” with. For them it is a station of respect and reverence. If an Elder walks down the street, they are taught to show respect and pay heed to their wisdom and guidance. If the rest of us are lucky, we can get a seniors discount at select stores by declaring they we are among the needy.
I’ve even went as far as researching communal living, intentional communities and cooperative housing, but I keep chickening out when it comes time to pull anything into action.
The idea of finding 4-6 like-minded families to share resources with and use our individual talents and skills to help each other really appeals to me. It makes sense to build resilience against harder times.
But to answer your question, smaller communities helping each other is against the capitalist ideal and is/will be thwarted at any scale by corporations and corporate influenced governments alike at every turn. So I guess that’s the most likely reason.
Be careful. Having ownership of your resources allows you to take your stuff, or sell it, and try something else somwhere else. If all the resources are communal, it is harder to escape if the things go south. One of the reasons why is it difficult to leave certain kind of cults.
Absolutely, which is why cooperative corporate structure appealed to me. Everyone has there same stake in it and still maintains their own separate lives. Only things that are agreed upon as shareable would be shared.
Like bulk food, equipment, etc.
Seniors who show they deserve respect should be given it. But plenty do not.
I hear you and agree, but part of me wonders if that is solely because they were always nasty people, or they are actually reacting to the awful way they get treated.
They are already probably dealing with failing health, burying most of their friends, not understanding most of what is going on in the world, feeling left behind, etc.
In their shoes I’m not sure if I could be very cheerful myself. Maybe I’ll get the opportunity to find out and hopefully I’ll not be one of the ones you mention, but who knows.
Most of us are tired from all the crap of the world already, imagine 30-40 more years of that on top of the things I just mentioned.
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.
I don't know, the whole being completely surrounded by backwards fucking hicks who hate my mere existence for living my life as who I actually am might have something to do with it.
Maybe, just maybe, I like living near people who accept me for who I am and most of those people are in cities while the rural areas are filled with hate filled fucking jackasses who couldn't manage to fucking read Green Eggs & Ham even if they had a gun pointed at their head with the threat of death if they failed.
Because they don't know how to do a spreadsheet for household budget.
Once you see the numbers all laid out, living in a small town is usually better in NA.
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.