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Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

Almost the only people doing well in rural America are those with generational wealth. I know plenty of people from my small hometown that have been doing okay with their farms. One of them has a gravel business. Those without such luck are either moving to a bigger city or experiencing a declining quality of life, and they're coping with drugs, meth mostly. I can't imagine what that would be like in areas that haven't been able to build that generational wealth.

The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again?

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Would remote work help? I would think encouraging or allowing more 'white-collar' workers to be more spread out throughout the country would help increase demand in places other than large cities and tech hubs.

I, for one, miss rural life (wide open space, less traffic, mom and pop stores, etc.) but unfortunately my career as a programmer doesn't cater to that lifestyle all that well.

I spent 4 years at my tech job in rural Virginia. Internet there was faster, cheaper, and more reliable than it has been in San Diego, where I am now. I had lots of friends there, it was always fun to enjoy the outdoors with them.

So it can help, but you eventually feel like a fish out of water when nearly nobody you know understands what it is you do. I feel like we'll get there one day in the USA, paying under $1000 for rent for a comfortable home is a lifestyle I wish i could see more technical people adopt.

Let's say you have a reasonably well-paying remote job and you could live anywhere. Let's also say you're married and have children. Do you want them to go to good schools? Do you want them to receive quality healthcare that does not break the bank? Do you want to use convenient services like Uber/Lyft when the need arises? Do you want access to a network of professionals that can help you grow your career?

If you answered yes to these questions, you're not going to find many places rural America that satisfy your needs. At best you'll end up in an outer-exurbia like greater Atlanta.

I don't think remote work of a few well-paid professionals is a viable and sustainable solution for rural America.

I'd probably pick a smallish (sub-250k population) city, I think. The kind that rural folks mean when they say they're going to The City to shop. Maybe a "university town". Beats exurbs or ultra-pricey real cities. The trick is finding one small enough that you aren't stuck with shitty schools if you want to live in the city core.

That's part of it. The other part is transit. Cars are bad; I don't really want to ever own one again and I definitely don't want to have to drive one every day if I do. So anywhere I'd want to move would need to either be super walkable or have transit. And small cities usually, IME, aren't the first and don't have the second.

I live in a 50K-population city adjoining Boston, so they exist, I just don't know how well they exist independent of bigger cities.

Inexpensive, 100%-no-car-required, and decent schools is... a tough set of requirements to satisfy in the US. Hell, getting any two of those is an accomplishment.

True enough. I'd pass on the third, at least for now, for the first two. But those two alone is a mess.

Regardless of where I live, I don't feel the need to leave my "home" every day. Not to say I don't go outside, but I don't need to commute somewhere (I own some acreage and I spent plenty of time on outside on it).

I live a few miles from pavement, so I definitely need a car to go anywhere. But I don't need to go anywhere on a normal day. I go to the nearest city about 3-4 times per month.

I do take advantage of UPS deliveries a lot, but I could do without if I were more patient.

I've set up my life to not need a daily commute, but I haven't taken the car out of it. If I tried harder, I could probably go without the car, but I don't think that would be healthy (Amazon Pantry options are lackluster last I looked).

To reiterate, I'm not even close to a paved road, let alone a grocery store or city, and I can manage not to drive very often. Seems like you could too, if you made it your focus. But we've all gotten used to living a few minutes from this and that and so we have to go do something, in our car, nearly every day.

I like people. I like being with people. I like seeing my friends in person. I also do not like cars. Healthy places don't need automobiles for everyday use, but hermitage is not something I'm remotely looking for.

Well that often tends to be the case. Most college towns, even little ones, are so much more expensive than the countryside.

Here in Ithaca NY, the property market (relative to income) is ungodly expensive, because most people either bought their houses decades ago when they were affordable, or they're college students who will pay any price in rent to get their quality education.

Some people commute in from as far away as Syracuse or even Pennsylvania. Property prices are much more affordable 15 minutes drive in any direction, but no college professor or staff would want their kids going to any of the crackerjack rural schools.

Can't say I speak for the Midwest, so it could be different there.

Champaign-Urbana, IL campus of UIUC, a top 5 CS program, good infrastructure, and charming

Honestly, the answer to all of those questions, for me, is "no" and I plan to move to a small rural town (<15k) very soon.

I'm married and have children - but we homeschool them, so the quality of the local schools is not a limiting factor.

Healthcare is not nearly so different even in very rural areas as you've made it out to be, especially not when you have a tech salary to enable you to travel to a teaching hospital if the need arises. If anything, regular/preventive care is less expensive and higher quality with a rural family doctor.

Uber and Lyft don't even make sense in a rural setting.

My professional network is already spread across the country, so that's not really an issue. I plan to spend more time and money on travel for conferences and such.

The only things we're really giving up are faster Internet access (we'll have 300Mb for ~$100/m, instead of 1Gb included in our rent) and food delivery services (which are too expensive to be using as much as we are, anyhow).

Are you serious with those questions?

I grew up on island in Alaska. Completed my last two years of high school in a small farming community in North Carolina. Joined the military and after ten years separated from southern Turkey, yet, somehow I was able to land a job as a data scientist.

I joined the military due to a lack of academic discipline though I still was accepted to the state schools in North Carolina, just choose otherwise. I have friends who did the same, though one did attend Chapel Hill on academic scholarship he received while graduating in Alaska. I have another friend who is now an anesthesiologist who graduated from University of Washington's medical school.

A few remote workers will do wonders for rural America in the short and long term. Saying you need to live in a major city to be successful is hogwash.

I never meant major cities, just any city. In another post in this thread I give examples of Indianapolis, Chattanooga, and St. Louis. They could hardly be described as major cities (at least compared to ny/la/sf). But the rural areas beyond those cities' suburbs are highly impoverished. Infrastructure costs are higher in rural areas. It makes more sense to subsidize efficient urbanization than to spend far more on inefficient ruralization. My other post in this thread has better detail in this regard.

Well, yes and no. It would help unless those jobs were shipped overseas. Many jobs that can be done remotely end up outsourced eventually. My father, who is a software developer, works remotely and makes an obscene amount of money for his area, but his position is not normal.

A few generations of really focused, quality education would help a lot more. Until then, I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess.

It'll be a bit of a mess in any case. In a lot of rural school districts, you've got better than half of the students on free-and-reduced lunches, and often upwards of a quarter or a third of the students on IEPs. I grew up in such a place, my mother still teaches in that district.

You really need to fix the basic underlying economic issues, so that you don't have kids coming to school hungry, and you don't have the best and brightest of the community fleeing so they can find work.

Absolutely! Frankly I'd argue that feeding your students should be a universal no-brainer anyway, especially when they can't afford it themselves. We know too damned much about the link between ability to learn and retain information, and a good nutritional intake to pretend that schools can ignore it to shave $$'s.

The problem is that public education is public and so it runs into various forms of ideological resistance on that basis. Worse, the power of local districts to shape educational policy leads to predictable deficits, often also driven by ideology/politics.

We have the money, we just choose to spend it on healthcare inflation, and weapons to sell. We don't see an immediate profit in education, so it's sidelined or privatized. We are shortsighted idiots, as a species.

Maybe this is just me, but fixing the underlying economic issues sound _hard_. Feeding kids breakfast sounds doable.

How would education bring back jobs to rural America?

Making an educated guess: better education with regards to job opportunities requirements allows you to compete in a smaller market so your work won't be offshored.

It won't. You will just have educated people that now have to move away to get jobs. It's a simple easy answer until you think about step #2, getting a job in rural America.

Education would make some of these people employable in the first place, and in jobs which a handful of robot arms can’t do better.

> The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again?

That's like asking how to revive the blacksmith industry in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. These regions aren't declining because of inattention, they're declining because their native industries are shrinking.

Surely there are regulatory treatments that can be applied here to relieve some of the suffering, but "return to the good old days" isn't an option.

I might agree with you if gp had said how to get the coal industries going again - but is there really _nothing_ which can usefully be made in community with lots of space and (compared to the bay area) insanely cheap housing?

It's cheap housing in the sense of price seen by the consumer due to scarcity. Housing in rural areas actually costs significantly more to produce and maintain in real economic terms.

The solution to high San Francisco housing costs is high density development in exurbs and other cities, and very much not "let's all move to Nebraska".

Plenty of things could be manufactured or coded in these areas. Cheap housing and materials in general mean you could make a really awesome hacker house or even factory for physical goods.

Of course the real problems are:

1) VCs don't invest here

2) A startup's success is usually based on its ability to sell itself (using networking contacts) to a larger corporation

3) who then REALLY don't want to have an office in Nowhere, Alabama

If they did want to do it, they would have done it already. Lord knows they have the money.

This is true and is hardly limited to the Old South. Rural Upstate New York is effectively in the same boat.

Frankly I think trying to develop rural America to be economically competitive to urban America is a bad idea wrapped in the cloak of a well-meaning idea. Infrastructure and services and much (like 2-5x) more expensive over a wide area. And you need a LOT of infrastrucute to reasonably support a professional class economy (just think how many specialist lawyers and doctors you would need before you could justify leaving a metro area).

Instead, we should focus our attention on lowering the cost of living in cities and enact policies that make it easy for people in rural, poorer areas to move to cities, such as a government-paid waiver on the first few months of rent, or a state-subsidized relocation package. There are a lot of people who would like to move but cannot save up enough to pay for relocation, security deposit, and things like that while they look for metro work.

Last time we seriously developed rural America it was in the 1930s, when the needs of an industrial economy were different and primarily the benefit was cheap rural manufacturing labor over costly metro manufacturing labor. But now far cheaper labor and supply chains are in China, so the New Deal framework is moot in this circumstance.

Make it easier for rural folks to come to cities, instead of trying to smear cities across the countryside. I can't see any other sustainable solution.

That being said, it doesn't mean everybody has to pack up for the coasts. A lot could be done to make inland cities like Indianapolis or Chattanooga or St. Louis more attractive to rural residents of their respective states.

Can confirm that from the perspective of a Midwesterner who grew up largely in smaller towns, one grows up feeling that moving to a major coastal city is nearly impossible. Even as a software developer I have to remind myself that no, really, I could move to one of those places. It's a hard mindset to get out of, and for most, it's also kind of true.

Smaller non-coastal cities retain, in the mind of the typical rural midwesterner, a reputation for high crime and violent racial unrest (among those old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, anyway). The former especially isn't entirely undeserved. And anyway, even those are shockingly expensive by rural standards, unless you want to live in the very worst parts of the city where the concerns of high crime and terrible, dangerous schools are especially valid.

To say that moving to the city, for most values of "the city", isn't broadly appealing to the rural set, is accurate.

While I am sympathetic to the cultural forces at play, it seems that most of the anti-city sentiment is from a position of...pickiness? you might call it? If it was literally a choice between starving and moving to a City, I suspect the choice would be much easier. But for most of rural America, the choice is between the misery that you know, and the alien world of 'the city'.

The City seems incredibly risky to rural folks, economically speaking. The housing prices seem absolutely insane, and earning enough money to cover it seems impossible.

So maybe you land a job first, then move, and it turns out you can (barely) scrape by renting in some place with a roommate in an area where you hear at least one gunshot a week. Great. I mean you heard at least one gunshot a week back home, right? Granted the targets were of another sort, but hey, different strokes. Then something goes wrong, and you don't know anyone (your family and friends are all back in the trailer parks and falling-down family farmhouses back where you came from), and you're a couple weeks away from being out on your ass and trying to decide between spending your remaining time looking for a job so you can keep scraping by, and digging in the couch cushions for money to buy a sandwich and a bus ticket home.

That's what low-(valued)-skill rural folks expect from an attempt to move to the city—and it's not the high-(valued)-skill ones who need help. Renting a crappy trailer for a couple hundred a month or living in cousin Eddie's broken RV parked in his A-frame's front yard next to his spare-parts truck, collecting food stamps, and working part-time when you can doesn't seem so bad by comparison.

Yes, of course. They're not the only picky ones, though.

For instance it's very common for income debates on HN to be full of comments about how people "cannot live on 12k/year."

Replace 12 with whatever threshold you think it is.

But they can, of course. I did for half of my adult life. It's a matter of pickiness. I had roommates I didn't enjoy, I ate rice and beans and ramen, I cooked for myself, I drove beater cars, I had no cell phone or no phone at all. But I always had money in the bank and I could pay my bills. It's a matter of choices.

So yes, it's a matter of pickiness about the city. They're destitute in the country, perhaps, but they're living in the home their grandfather built, on the land he farmed, their cousin lives a mile up the dirt road, etc. Many of them aren't unhappy, frankly--people here have decided they are.

But they aren't sure they'll make a lot more money by moving to the city, and they're definitely unsure about how they'll like it. My best guess is that most of them wouldn't. I moved away from the city on purpose, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.

I would move back before I starved, but not much before that.

I don't know if there's much you can do to induce rural folks to move to urban areas. The brightest kids from rural areas go to colleges, get job offers in the Metro, and move. The ones left behind are either those who couldn't get a job offer, go to college or are too old. What would you tell these people to do?

There just isn't an easy solution other than an intensive retraining in relevant skills. Or aggressively searching for jobs tailored to the skills they possess. (e.g. I remember reading about JetBlue using suburban stay at home women for handling customer support or something).

Also people who are used to their slow-paced, conservative and rural way of life will probably be more than a little shocked by city culture.

The one thing America has is a high rural population compared to say Canada. Moving more people into cities is a bad approach we need to spread people around the country and raise up small towns instead leaving them.

> Moving more people into cities is a bad approach we need to spread people around the country and raise up small towns instead leaving them.

Why? City-dwelling is, broadly, much cheaper (in terms of infrastructure and services) and more environmentally friendly than other arrangements.

How many services do you need? Schools, hospitals, housing, grocery stores and clothing. The outdoors then becomes your entertainment.

Water, power, communication, unemployment and other poverty support, mail, law enforcement. Everything. Are you arguing rural living comes with cheaper services and less environmental harm, in the typical case? That'd be great, if true.

[EDIT] Transportation. Worth including on the list, in particular.

Having lived in small communities all my life, I would say they are cheaper as far less is required. Water, power and communication I am uncertain, though internet appears better in certain smaller communities. You need far less law enforcement as crime is typically lower. Mail might cost more, but that is factored into shipping costs.

Smaller towns when done correctly can be more self-sufficient. Within an hour and half driving radius (minimum) from where I live, it is entirely farm land. I believe 90% of the food my family eats comes from these farms and is cheaper. I purchased half a cow recently from a local rancher - 295 lbs of grass fed beef for $1400 total, butcher fees included. Also purchased a whole pig from a local farmer ~250 lbs for $750, butcher fees included. From the same farmer I purchased 8 chickens a month from them at $12 - 15 per chicken from May - September, not cheaper but worth the money. We can get produce, raw milk, cheese and eggs from all the farmers here as well.

It takes money up front, planning and a deep freezer but we are supporting the local economy, reducing transportation costs and have locally sources food. If we didn't purchase our meat from the farmers I would hunt, but there isn't a need to do both as a family of four can only eat so much in a year.

These are some of the benefits when you downsize to small communities you can know your consumption patterns easier. We haven't been able to do this for everything but this year we have finally figured out the food issue. We still purchase spices, tea and coffee which at the store but those were the first items traded at a global scale if memory serves me correctly.

One would think there is enough land in the US to do this, but it would take a major cultural shift in eating patterns and the way we operate - feasible in theory but probably not reality.

You should look up the costs of supporting rural living. They're heavily subsidized, at least in the US. Living in rural communities is cheaper to the individual right now, but significantly more expensive to society overall. If you can find data to the contrary I'd be interested in it.

Lots of utopian plans for city designs and such revolve around spreading people out farther and having lots of "green space" and farmland interspersed with living and business districts, but fail on closer examination because it's really hard to be more efficient (cheaper) and more environmentally friendly than having very dense cities yielding, as quickly as possible (i.e. minimizing sprawl and low-density suburbs/exurbs) to farmland. If you can find data supporting the case for lower-density living as cheaper (overall) and more environmentally friendly than denser living, again, I'd be very interested in seeing it. People come up with those spread-out hypothetical cities for a reason—agrarian (even faux-agrarian) living is appealing, if difficult to advocate given the economics of it.

Schools need good teachers and administrators. Hospitals need good doctors and nurses. Housing needs construction labor and assurance for the developer that their investment will pay off.

We as a nation do not produce many good teachers. We do not produce enough doctors period.

This isn't SimCity. Can't just plop a school or hospital down for a fixed sum and expect things to sort themselves out.

I live in a small town 30k population. Good teachers and doctors. Living in a city doesn't automatically indicate there are goods schools or doctors. You have greater choice, but that is all.

Personally I think the current socioeconomic trends are firmly against small towns and they're all dying and this will continue until something drastic changes.

For one, family farms have largely been replaced by agribusiness, which tends to be far more economical.

For another, employment and home ownership trends are bad for small towns. Employment is now more short-term. There are hardly any "jobs for life" now. This makes those with limited employment prospects (in that there are few employers in their area) particularly vulnerable to change. Home ownership makes the labour market as a whole less flexible/mobile.

The solution to these problems is urbanization.

What's more, the suburbs formed in WW2 with the explosion in private vehicle ownership and, for some reason, governments actively subsidized it. People will often declare (here and elsewhere) that they like to live in the suburbs. It's cheaper, the lots and houses are larger and so on. Thing is, no one is paying the true cost of this in terms of all the infrastructure to support it, be it roads, railways, utilities, schools, hospitals and so on.

If you look at the major urban centers, they tend to generate a surplus and that surplus is used to subsidize those that live outside that city. It's true in NYC. It's true in London.

At some point I expect this to end, which will strengthen the trend towards urbanization.

One problem is that construction pretty much everywhere is becoming unaffordable. This applies to housing and infrastructure. Homeowners get excited about their rising property values but that's pretty short term thinking. There was an article posted here last week about how all the cheap eats are disappearing from SF. Well, real estate costs (land + construction) are an input into literally everything. You simply can't have cheap services in an area with expensive real estate in the long term.

Construction costs are a real problem eg [1]. Australia, which once had a great standard of living, is now ridiculously expensive in local times. Honestly, it's like the whole country is Vancouver. IIRC the median house price in Sydney is now A$1.1m (up from ~$650k ~7 years ago).

[1]: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/why-is-affordable-hou...

It rather amazes me how intelligent people who've lived through some of the most rapidly changing times ever seem sure they know the future.

Imagine a glut of cheap energy, rapidly improving materials science, pervasive robotics, and large-scale 3D printing. I think it's almost inevitable that construction costs would come way down. Between telepresence and cheap transportation, the need to aggregate people into urban environments would cease.

I think it's highly likely things will go in this direction at some point.

I wonder, how "well" did previous generations do?

The bar has been moved so far, so quickly, that it's hard (for me) to say. I would venture that folks in rural America are living better than they ever have. I see truly destitute people, too...I live in one of the poorer counties of one of the poorer states in the USA. But people aren't starving, and depending how far back you go, that was a reality people would have to face.

Point is, we're now comparing rural incomes to city incomes, and thinking "well the farmer is busting his ass with a lot of risk to make 45k, and the baby-faced web dev in the city can make 90k twiddling his fingers." Sure, but they're both...okay. I'm not sure we have to make them equal. I'm not sure we can.

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