I think it's probably easier just to promote remote work.
<tinfoil>
If your goal is to make rural people (historically a very hard group for governments to control, everywhere, not just in the US) more dependent on and controllable by the state then it works great.
</tinfoil>
(Yes, I know I'm just stirring the pot by saying this)
I know many rural Americans like to imagine they're still living on the lawless frontier uncorrupted by civilization and Federalism, but.... it's not actually true that they're less dependent on the state than "city folk." Hell, in many cases rural areas are more dependent on the state.
And ironically, it's that pastoral, romantic delusion of the statelessness of rural America that leads to the very same populist ideology that makes them easier to control. Like believing a billionaire globalist with a history of exploiting low wage employees and a loose relationship with the truth is an honest, God-fearing hard working friend of the common man.
I'd like to see you back up this claim, but either way dependence on "the state" isn't really what matters.
What matters is the interdependence between the two locales. Cities are almost entirely dependent on rural areas for their food. Rural areas could continue to exist without cities; the reverse is not true.
Cities are also more fragile than rural areas. Say something catastrophic were to happen to some region of the US, something that wiped out communications infrastructure, electricity generation, supply routes (roads, rail), etc. The cities in this region would be foodless within a few days. Depending on the city, there would be either no running water or dirty running water. Even if martial law were quickly instituted, violence and starvation would result.
Contrast this to the rural areas. Food would certainly be an issue, but it is more likely that the population is either (a) near agricultural infrastructure or (b) prepared to fish/hunt/forage. It helps that there are less mouths to feed.
Furthermore, most people are on wells and/or septic tanks, which barring damage gives them a much longer timeline before water/sanitation becomes an issue. Again, it helps that there is a lower density of people needing drinking water and sanitation.
I guess my ultimate point is that strategically, it is the rural areas holding the cards. Would they be poorer without the cities? Absolutely. Could they survive? They did for generations.
As far as hunting and fishing goes, few people living in rural areas would be capable of living entirely off the land for an extended period of time, so the premise that they would be able to survive a disaster more or less unscathed while the city dwellers starve is just really not true, at least not as true as Americans would like to believe.
One problem rural areas do have is lack of disaster preparedness funds. I live in Texas, and I've seen what happens when disasters hit rural areas. The same people who complain about Washington and city dwellers wind up in tent cities being tended to by the Red Cross and FEMA.
See how well agricultural communities do without farm subsidies, housing loans or food stamps. Without the state keeping them alive, a lot of them would simply die out.
And this is my ultimate point - most Americans who live in rural areas are little less domesticated than their urban counterparts.
Why do you feel the need to shut down entire communities?
Do we subsidize their lives as some have suggested with UBI? Do we try to revitalize industries that failed? As someone who lives in a small town, what do you think would help those towns and their residents?
We are trying to solve regional issues from a national perspective. Local government and issues needs to become more important. Locals need to solve local issue. People in Portland, OR aren't going to to solve issues in Mandeville, LA.
I have no quarrel with small towns per se. Some host substantial mining or logging or manufacturing operations. Some provide services for large surrounding agrarian areas. Others are bedroom communities for city workers who trade a commute for cheaper living arrangements. These are all fine. These towns have solid economic reasons for existing, and are therefore viable. No problem. But others are not so fortunate.
More to the point, how do you avoid putting the people you displaced from their homes on a high-rent, low-wage treadmill?
Sure lots of these small towns don't need as MUCH centralization as they have but they still need services because there are still people and things to do out in those places.
Now, given modern transportation and things like Amazon, the density in outlying areas may not be as needed. Driving through rural missouri, you see a lot of very tiny dead towns at crossroads, where there used to be a general store, etc, and these died in the 30s. Then you have slightly bigger towns that are dying now. These towns were starting to die in the 90s. In the 60s it took around 8 hours to get from St. Louis to the arkansas border (except along 55). When I was a kid in the 80s it took 4-5 hours. Now it takes 3:30. Because of this you don't need as many of these services as local, but that doesn't mean you don't need them.
Also driving through rural missouri you see things you wouldn't expect. My cousin owns a VERY profitable organic chicken ranch about 2 hours outside of St. Louis, near Owensville. Going further south you find all of a sudden where like 80% of the oak for charcoal and wine / burbon barrels come from. It's completely unreasonable for these folks to commute from St. Louis. It's also completely tenable for them to live in a house in the middle of no where and make plenty of money for that life style.
What seems to be happening is that much of the rural area is becoming LESS dense as you need only basic services and health care, gas food, etc.
There's also other things that need lots of space that you can easily do in rural areas that you can't do other places. If I was to switch to running a textile mill, or a machine shop, and did it in Seattle (where I live now), or St. Louis (where I used to live), I'd have to plunk down 2-5 million on a warehouse. If I did this in Wenatchee area or Owensville, the land is like $200k, and I just build the building and put that other 1-2 million into better tooling and employees, and the effective minimum wage (what people actually need to live), is a lot lower out there because everything is cheaper. Which means product is cheaper.
Also, I don't see why remote workers can't live in small towns. They offer a certain quality of life many desire.
But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society.
It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.
What would some examples of this be, in your opinion?
People act as if all these small towns are growing our food and are vital for the national economy when in reality the vast majority of them consist simply of the industry required for their local suburban/rural existence (schools, supermarkets, hospitals, road maintenance, etc.).
The places that are actually productive (e.g. large agricultural regions) of course have to stay but these are relatively not so populated to begin with (and use less and less labor every year). People have no idea of the magnitude of distortion that props up the myth of the small town in America.
Policywise, I think a gradually introduced land value tax and carbon tax (replacing to some degree property and income taxes) could do a lot to enact this restructuring in a "natural" way.
That said, just because food and lumber has to be grown somewhere doesn't mean it has to be grown in American small towns and rural communities. My wheat and rice can come from Mexico and Thailand and my beef from Argentina.
There are other considerations, too. Favoring local products is a good way to keep poor food-exporting countries poor. I don't want that, though I understand some people have different priorities from me.
The article provides several examples showing that those industries continue to operate in small towns, but that they require very little labor anymore, due to mechanization and automation.
The majority of the financial gains for these industries go to the capital owners (including all of us who can afford to save for retirement), not to the local labor pool. The labor pool doesn't have leverage to change that, because they often have few other options for work in their area.
The remote workers transplanted from cities aren't going to meaningfully increase employment in the old sectors. They will just enjoy the cheap housing and lower cost for low-skilled services.
Local low-skilled labor won't be able to suddenly shift to high-skilled remote IT work, and the sectors are too different to have an effect on the others' labor rates.
At best, the remote IT workers' discretionary local spending might prop up a few small service businesses, like restaurants, but the remote workers are likely to keep most of their capital in the same non-local financial instruments that their equivalents in cities do. And who could blame them for doing so?
Many people in my town are exactly what you'd expect. But a good fraction of them are millionaires with huge McMansions and lakeside property. The cars that go down my road are a mix of beat up pick up trucks and Cadillacs.
I guarantee you, no outside entity subsidizes us. Not with those kind of property taxes coming in. And I guarantee you, my town is not unique in this regard.
The people who don’t need the help have little incentive to sacrifice their limited resources to help the less advantaged, and the people who do need it don’t know what they need so they get sucked in by destructive authoritarian politicians who focus on the next election instead of the next 20 years.
However, the entire reason this is happening is because technology is shifting the economic system to require high-skill concentration into cities and low-skill jobs offloaded to cheap countries rather than needing lots of rural resource-generating towns. It’s easy for me to blame visionless politicians and people, but I think in the end we are all beholden to the system. But what is a system but lots of individual people effecting each other? How did socialism and communism reach their height of popularity in the US in the 1930’s? Can we beat the system by changing it, or is it just too big to ever reach a critical mass of change?
This creates two massive problems for today's society:
Today "Romanizing" has a different name: Cultural Genocide. Whether intentional or not, you are eradicating the cultures you have displaced. Today that's considered a violation of human rights and human dignity. You can't do that and if you try you are at least going to have to find something to mitigate the problem. Do you create an intersectional matrix that finds the most marginalized peoples and leaves them as they are? How do you decide who is most marginalized if you have to move someone. What if their culture a kind of terroir? Can it not exist if you remove it from that place? If so what do you do? Even if they have their language, are the Gullah still the Gullah if you remove them from their diet and usual place of livelihood? Not to mention, when you move their their language will likely disappear and members become assimilated.
Then you have the Refugee Resettlement or "Oakie" Problem. You are introducing a new out-group who will compete for resources and power with an existing in-group. This always causes conflict. In theory, if the in-group view the out-group as either dumb and/or untrustworthy, they turn their judgemental views into critical views and their critical views into moral judgements. After all, value judgements never sit still. After a while they begin incarcerating the most marginalized of the out-group and the scapegoating starts. If not carefully calibrated and balanced the in-group start caving heads in with baseball bats, but the more you carefully calibrate it, the more you return back to the "Romanization" problem.
There are a lot of other problems that arise, but these are the two most consistent when dealing with humans.