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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Cities are not cheaper safer or greener. And they're more social only if you care about quantity over quality.

I personally find cities to be disgusting overcrowded places that are harmful to my mental health and I try to stay as far away as I can from them.

If there was no rural America the cities would collapse. Where do you think your food comes from?r Where do you think all the manufacturing is?

Where do you think all the people who actually make things live?

Cities live on the backs of rural people and it's time to stop subsidizing them and send some of that money to the rural communities.

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>If there was no rural America the cities would collapse. Where do you think your food comes from?r Where do you think all the manufacturing is?

Southeast Asia? Mexico?

Really not getting into anything that looks like a flame-war here, the obvious solution is a better balance between everyone not a who is better argument but rural areas often are more heavily subsidized per capita and do not have the same economic generators that cities do. None of that is to say urban is more important or rural is more important. Statements like where do you think all the people who actually make things live undervalues the absolutely essential interdependence between urban and rural areas.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-rural-america-needs-c...

> Where do you think your food comes from?

From the massive and increasingly automated mega farms that don’t need the support of rust belt and country towns full of the impoverished or people choosing a rural lifestyle for cultural reasons

> Cities live on the backs of rural people and it's time to stop subsidizing them and send some of that money to the rural communities.

Cities subsidize rural areas fiscally, look at the tax base in a city, and a rural area. Suburban US by the way is the most subsidized part of the country, BTW. StrongTowns has published an enormous amount of work in this arena.

And rural areas subsidize cities calorically.

You can't eat money.

And all the money is useless if you can't buy anything. Cities are great at churning through money in services but they don't actually produce most of the things that they use.

So yeah if you look just at dollars, cities produce more. But they would fail utterly without the rural areas, I don't think cities give enough credit to that.

Strong towns is very myopic in what they focus on. They are not considering the second order of effects of things like reducing the scale of the interstate system.

> personally find cities to be disgusting overcrowded places that are harmful to my mental health and I try to stay as far away as I can from them.

That's why the suicide rate is 4 times higher in rural areas then.

I live near downtown in the largest city in the US and my eggs, seafish, and rum come from 5 miles down the road.

Where does the wheat come from to make the bread? Where do the cows come from to make the hamburger?

For that matter, where does the grain come from to feed the chickens? Where does the molasses come from to make the rum?

Pretty sure the answer to all of these is "from a lot further than five miles down the road"...

like half of one percent of people work in agriculture.

And you would like these people to work in complete isolation?

Or is it okay if there are people in rural areas living near them?

And you're completely ignoring that just because someone works in agriculture they still need services like car mechanics barbers etc etc The actual number of people who work in agriculture if you include all those is considerably higher.

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