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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

Bad for which economy? Countless programmers over the years have packed up their bags and moved away from their small towns to live in big expensive tech hubs. This has certainly been beneficial for the economy of large metros--they didn't pay to educate these workers and in many cases these workers (including myself) were raised and educated in completely different countries. So these metros have a huge pool of high-skilled young working age adults bringing billions into the economy just in taxes. But what about the towns these people are from? They essentially get nothing out of the bargain, unless one day one of those workers decides to plop down a retirement home there, which by then their economic contributions have already peaked. The way I see it remote work reverses this trend and offers a far more equitable way of doing things. It takes the strain off the big metros and allows wealth to be spread more equally across the country.

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The big metros are more efficient (dollar-wise) and have a lower environmental impact than small towns. Small towns, in the US, are already subsidized by big towns, at least economically.

> The big metros are more efficient (dollar-wise)

Depends for who. When a studio apartment in a big metro costs as much as a house in a small town, you need to shell out much more for a comparable level of comfort.

I know a couple who paid literally half per unit area just because they chose live a few kilometres from the city, not in it. They both work partially remotely, so ultimately the savings will be greater than the cost of transport, especially now that interest rates have gone up so much in this region of the world.

Subsidised by more than the effect of the employee living, eating, and being entertained there?

And that doesn't account for GP's immigrant case at all.

Suburbs are economically insolvent, dense cities aren’t. That’s the case for basically every suburb and dense downtown in the US.

I think that's because of what we're talking about right now -- all of these workers heading to the big cities instead of living out in the suburbs. When the workers return to the suburbs, business will follow them, and they won't be insolvent anymore.

The suburbs around Boston are definitely not economically insolvent, and the ones in metro-west are fairly flush financially (continually building and upgrading schools and other town amenities).

The suburbs around Boston are effectively dense cities because they predate railroads, nevermind cars. You don't need skyscrapers to claim "density".

Is that a "No True Suburb" argument?

Is Cambridge a suburb of Boston?

You've also called out Watertown, Arlington, etc as modern American suburbs before but their density ranks well above major cities. But that's because they're not modern American suburbs. They're classical Streetcar Suburbs that predate the car and that's a very different thing.

IMO, there's zero doubt that Arlington and Watertown are suburbs of Boston by the most reasonable definitions of the word ("a. an outlying part of a city or town b. a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city")

However, if you continue to object to calling them suburbs of Boston, then look at Carlisle, Dover, Lexington, Lincoln, Sherborn, Sudbury, Wellesley, Weston, Winchester, and on and on. None of those Boston suburbs are even hurting for money, let alone "insolvent".

Source for that claim? I hear it all the time, but never a source that actually stands up to scrutiny. (strongtowns is the most common - they are not a source)

Why is the strongtowns paper not a source?

Because it isn't a rigorous investigation. Or maybe it is an attempt, but they cherry pick data and do other things that shouldn't pass peer review.

I think that's really missing the point of this hypothetical?

This is not subsidisation. This is a small town participating in economy and offering better price for housing or better walkabikity or better socialization options or something.

> and have a lower environmental impact than small towns

Can you expand on that (or link to more) ?

You can see a map of household carbon footprint by ZIP code on this map: https://coolclimate.org/maps

A cursory glance shows that the densest urban centers have the lowest carbon footprint. The suburbs are much higher, with affluent suburbs often being more than twice as high. Only some very rural areas approach levels as low as the cities.

Look at 'Strong towns'. Not exactly what GP said, but close enough.

Big cities are dependent on agriculture and raw materials from rural regions for their survival. The small town can exist without the big city, the reversal is not true.

As always through history, politicians and bankers plunder the country with taxes and interest. This wealth is then distributed by them, from the big cities, but that doesn't mean that the wealth originated there.

And agricultural areas are dependent on transport hubs to deliver them goods resources from far-flung regions, as well as manufactured goods where the factories want to be near those transport hubs to minimize the cost of inputs. Farming villages are not all producing their own fertilizer from scratch, nor are they all manufacturing combine harvesters from locally-sourced iron. Likewise, facilities for essential high-skill services (e.g. advanced medical care) cannot sustainably be housed in every hamlet in the world.

Concentration will always happen, and it will always happen to the benefit of rural areas, who will pay a premium in order to access the goods and services that are most efficiently produced in urban areas, in the same way that the high-density areas will pay a premium for the agricultural outputs of the rural areas.

Therefore, as far as this goes:

> The small town can exist without the big city, the reversal is not true.

This is only true for values of "exist" where small towns are reduced to primitive subsistence farming. If you live in a rural area in the US and enjoy modern comforts like an iPhone, you have the cities of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and whatever your regional rail hub is to thank for getting it into your hands.

> Concentration will always happen, and it will always happen to the benefit of rural areas

Agreed! Both cities and rural areas benefit from each other, but I'm not confused as to what structure is dependent on the other. Cities don't produce their basic necessities and cannot exist without the rural areas. My response was to the poster claiming that rural areas are dependent on cities, when it is clearly not so.

> Farming villages are not all producing their own fertilizer from scratch, nor are they all manufacturing combine harvesters from locally-sourced iron

This iron and fertilizer is certainly not coming from the cities, but I know each region will have their niche. That's why I separated agriculture and raw materials production in the post.

> And agricultural areas are dependent on transport hubs

These hubs can and do exist without the cities. More and more of these are constructed outside of the cities because they are an inconvenience to the city populace. I think we will see the world moving even more in that direction. Especially modern delivery shopping has completely revolutionized how goods are acquired in rural areas. People who had to go to town to get things they needed now order online and wait for the truck to come around. If they order fertilizer or a combine harvester, those goods have probably not been in any city on their way from producer to customer.

> Likewise, facilities for essential high-skill services (e.g. advanced medical care) cannot sustainably be housed in every hamlet in the world.

Yes, I know of whole cities that are centered around hospitals and health care. It's one of those high skilled services that just have to be very centralized to be effective.

> This is only true for values of "exist" where small towns are reduced to primitive subsistence farming.

Who said the small town has to be cut off from the world?

Most small towns where remote workers might settle are not driven by agriculture. Agriculture matters, but we don't live in an economy where everything outside of metro areas is just farms as far as the eye can see.

This is strikingly false in the state of Ohio. If you drive outside of the cities, you will literally see farms everywhere. As far as you can see.

I'm not saying it's only agriculture, but rural areas give much more to urban areas than they receive back, evident by the massive waste and corruption within the cities and the throngs of people being sustained in the cities without producing anything of value or anything at all.

In the past you could certainly say that urban areas give back just as much or even more, when factories where concentrated in cities. Today the factories are not only in the cities.

In poor 'African' farming communities this is true. In any even slightly developed country the farms are not self sufficient: they focus on a cash crop and go to town to buy things that they don't grow. Sure any rural farm could be self sufficient, but division of labor makes them far more efficient - at the expensive of needing the city to provide all the logistics that make it possible for them to get things they don't or can't grow (can't meaning something that doesn't grow in their climate, while don't means they could grow it but they do not).

That’s not evident at all, just your biases talking LOUD.

Materially it is a fact that urban areas need rural areas to survive, while rural areas needs don't need the urban areas.

The country side can be self sufficient, the city can never be. Thousands of trucks deliver excess goods from the country side to the city every day. Saying that it is the city that supports the country side is fancy accounting.

> evident by the massive waste and corruption within the cities and the throngs of people being sustained in the cities without producing anything of value or anything at all.

Where on earth did you get this impression? I have lived in both small rural towns and large cities, and this is hogwash.

This is some weird rural populist hogwash with no basis in reality. The economy is a highly interdependent system. Cities need farms and farms need cities.

Indeed

I live far, far away from my company, in tiny village while earning salary like people working there

and im spending that money locally, thus supporting local businesses and communities

There are 2.5 million developers in the US. Most of them don’t live in tech hubs. Most of them work for hospitals, insurance companies, state and local government, etc.

Even outside of tech hubs, the distribution of where those workers end up is pretty different from the the distribution of where they were raised. Not many of my classmates from rural Wisconsin ended up in the Bay Area or New York, but many moved to Chicago or Minneapolis, and of those still in Wisconsin, almost all of those with white-collar jobs are in Milwaukee or Madison. Lots of cities and even many college towns in "flyover country" are doing just fine, but the brain drain from towns with less to offer is very real.

I imagine my hometown would be a very different place if people didn't have to leave to get decent jobs. Though of course there are plenty of other good reasons to leave.

What the small town gets out of it is property values going up because families want to live there because they have good schools that set children on a path to go to a good college, learn a lot, and then move to a city and make a bunch of money.

I don't think that's how that works. It's evident by the fact that there are no school towns like there are college towns. Once the people earning the money move out, there is no taxes left to fund education. Unless we nationalize education, which is not going to happen (at least in America).

School quality is one of the most important criteria people use when deciding where to buy a house.

Maybe within a city, but people are not moving to another town/city to get access to a good school. The primary factor for people moving somewhere is still jobs. If that wasn't the case why will these people move out of the place which made them this capable?

Are you in the US? People here absolutely move to get access to what they perceive as good schools for their kids' needs. That can include leaving a major city for a suburb or choosing between multiple suburbs/small towns based on schools.

Work-from-home ads more flexibility, but even with a traditional commute there are typically multiple towns/school districts within an easy range of any given workplace assuming you can afford good transportation.

I think the point was that they would move somewhere for work and then look for school in a given radius from work. That may fall into a different city/town than they work or not. But they are not moving to a new city or town because of the school and then looking for work within a radius of that school.

In the US schools are hyperlocal. So a job might bring someone to the general area, but the school system makes them buy in given locality in the area.

That is what I was trying to say. Schools are the second priority. This leads to more taxes for places with better jobs. Sure you will maybe choose a given area for the schools, but that area is limited to drivable distance from work. Work comes first, schools second.

The only reason we DIDN'T move during Covid was because of the school, otherwise we'd be living in the sticks in a huge house that's 50% cheaper and 200% bigger.

Yes, but we all accept covid times were exceptions right? But it can become the norm if remote work becomes the norm. The reason you moved to wherever you were during covid was probably because you had a good job there.

> no taxes left to fund education

which is why it's really a stupid policy decision to fund schooling via local taxation. There should be federally funded schools.

It is probably stupid, but I don't think that can ever change. The US political system is not set up to encourage nationalization, or even state based control, of anything.

edit: It also rewards the wrong people. The schools which made someone capable of getting a high paying job does not get anything in return. In fact with people moving out they get less and less money to improve themselves. Even in the most individualistic view of the system, the wrong individual is being rewarded.

> The schools which made someone capable of getting a high paying job does not get anything in return.

as it should be - the school should not be able to capture the output of its students, while at the same time, getting "free" funding. If the school would capture some of the output of the students in the future (aka, the successful ones), then the school would need to invest in the students via equity (aka, pay the students while they're being taught!).

The school _could_ get reputational reward for producing great students. That's about as far as a return a school can get.

I think this is the exact wrong direction.

California moved to statewide funding parity for schools and voters simply decided they don't want to pay taxes that aren't local. This lead directly to capping property taxes in the state.

> California moved to statewide funding parity for schools and voters simply decided they don't want to pay taxes that aren't local.

Was there a reason given by these people for this? Or was it just "I don't want to pay for someone else". Because that is the core issue with US politics. Everything will improve if that goes away.

That was the reason. Nobody wants to pay a high tax to support schools when only a small fraction of that goes to their children's local school.

Better to minimize the tax, have shitty public schools, and pay for private schools.

It makes sense from a certain perspective.

It was essentially the no child left behind policy for schools. No public schools are allowed to be better funded than the worst schools, so people look for alternatives to the system.

Is that common in practice? The only example I can think of of a smallish town with excellent public schools is West Lafayette, IN. (It looks like Jackson, WY, and Aspen, CO, also have good schools, but I don't think those are very good examples given that they're so far out of reach for typical families.) Other than that, all of the great school districts I know of are in suburbs of big cities, and the small towns I'm familiar with have decent schools at best.

Maybe it will be more common in the future as a result of remote work. But today it seems hard to create the conditions that result in great school districts - i.e., a relatively high concentration of relatively high-income parents who value education - in a small town that's not within commuting distance of a city with good jobs.

Heh. Well, methinks your idea and mine as to what constitutes a small town are somewhat different. The small town (pop.~1500 at the time) canceled pre-calc my senior year; the district contacted, individually, the 3 of us that had enrolled. Something about being the only person who had enrolled, so they couldn't justify a regularly scheduled class. I guess they might have thought that nerds didn't talk to each other. While I don't doubt there are many non-mega-urban environments that fit your descriptions, the number of small (wee?) towns that might lay claim to such a tax would kill such a program in its crib.

>would kill such a a program in the crib.

Did I miss something in the comment you're replying to or do I need to read the article?

1500 is a small town for sure. I'd consider 12k to be a small town as well. 1500 is way bigger than the town my dad is from. There's about 100 people there now. Your small town is huge compared to that. He sometimes talks about being on the highschool football team at the school shared by a collection of towns in the county. He says they did pretty damn good in the first half, but by the second they were all so worn out that they'd just get steamrolled. They only had enough players to cover the field you see. The guys all played both offense and defense.

I imagine even a couple folks moving back there and working remotely would be a huge boon for the town. Heck, it'd make a big difference in the county, what with the biggest town only being around 3k people. It's very pretty there, but it's over an hour to the nearest city that has any kind of employment opportunities. If you can't make finances work on the pay from the gas station, your options are move out of town or move out of town. The internet is decent there and being able to work remotely would be the difference between being able to survive in that town or having to move away to find decent-paying work.

Comment on comment regarding idea of some sort of remuneration going to the home town of those who grew up there.

The difference between a town of 1500 and 12000 is very significant the further you get from a (real) city. Kids from nw Kansas drove to Hays to party, not Denver or KC because they were 3+ and 7+ hours away by car.

They were talking about the tax dollars of remote workers going to the smaller towns. It's not exactly a program that needs to be set up.

It didn't seem relevant to me in terms of the discussion, so I countered with an even smaller town. I grew up in a decent-sized metro area, but I've definitely lived the 3-hour drive to the nearest Target. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

1500 sounds like a village.

Apparently, 5000 is a common lower bound for what constitutes a "town". But then again, I have friends who live in smaller towns than that, and they might feel a bit insulted if I said they live in a "village".

Yeah. I agree, but I don't think that population_exporter provides that metric. (at least not in the US)

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