Hey, I'm one of those people. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania that was rural until very recently, but it's still only about 20 minutes' drive west of Philadelphia. So it had the charm of rural life (at least when I was growing up–it's become a bit gentrified since then) and if you wanted to get your shot of urban culture it wasn't that far away.

The real trick nowadays is finding the "middle" small town America: places that have good infrastructure, public transportation, universities, libraries, public works, etc but aren't urban. Of course, it helps a lot if you don't have to commute, or you only have to commute to the office a few days out of the week.

There is small town rural life within an hour of any big coastal city. You don't have to move to the homogeneous middle of the country for that. Suggesting people move from a popular place to middle America for a good quality of life is disingenuous in my view because its predicated entirely on the fact that it's "cheaper". Their lives aren't going to be "richer"...only their bank account for a time, but even that will fade as salary and opportunity are less as well. Yes some people enjoy being surrounded only by their race, religion, and politics so that outweighs the losses of accessibility, culture, and experience...and frankly most of the ones who have never experienced anything else don't even know what they are missing...getting away from that gave me the only good parts of my life personally. Once again...people don't put photos or postcards of Topeka or Little Rock or some town nobody knows of in the vast sameness of the Midwest on their dream walls. There is a reason for that.