People have voted with their feet and the feet have voted for cities.
Living on twenty acres sounds great until you realize you'd like TVs, internet, toilet paper, a car, and education for your kids. Turns out those things cost money because there's only so much of them - how are you gonna make an income living in the middle of nowhere to pay people to send it all your way?
What can you do for them? Who do you know?
If you're lucky you can provide agricultural products, but likely not at a competitive scale - so you'll hemorrhage money season after season. All of those people you see on instagram selling cabbages? They're not selling the cabbages, they're selling the instagram. Your network will be reduced to a bunch of other people in the same boat. Your life will likely enter a downward spiral into irrelevance.
You either bring all of the money you'll ever need, or find a way to decouple from society as much as possible because you'll likely have little to offer it. Remote work affects all of this but even then it's a dangerous proposition - if the winds change you're done for, and your network is still going to be shot.
Piling into cities (and suburbs) is just common sense. It's where the jobs are.
EDIT: some wording, two -> twenty (oops lol)
We have pretty much every profession in the area. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, software engineers, etc. You’re probably out of luck if you’re, say, an actuary.
The real difference is you’re not going to reacher the professional peaks that you can in a city. You can be a lawyer, but you’re not going to be able to become some hotshot partner at a big, well known firm. You also might not be able to specialize in what you want. You can be a software engineer, but maybe not one that specializes in machine learning.
Of course, nowadays we have WFH and you very well might be able to have your cake and eat it too. That’s part of the reason I’m quitting my job as a wedding photographer and moving back into the SWE space this winter.
Rural is when you have to drive to get to your nearest neighbor. I think the vast majority of people who live in rural areas only do so out of generational inertia. The entire rural population can very easily be fit into the exurbs around metros if that's what they wanted
With a remote tech job, like I've been doing for over a decade while living on a rural four acre lot. I started with crappy satellite internet and now have decent satellite internet. And also toilet paper, etc.
I love it out here and can hardly imagine wanting to live in a city anymore.
I also moved out of the major metros - some things are worth the risk :)
Also, there's something beetween between big city suburbs and middle of nowhere. Smaller towns can offer a healthy amount of jobs and services, especially ones that are within commute distance from larger ones. Moving from a village/town of 4000 people to one of 140 000 didn't really change my daily life much, apart from having more variety of food in supermarket, and much more expensive and worse housing.
The rural county I live in saw an influx of people moving very far from the city, only to be forced to leave again because of RTO. We had a huge population boom, only for it to be ripped away by shortsighted managers who don’t care about what their workers want.
Living inner city kind of makes you a social hub where everyone wants to come to your place because it's super accessible by public transport so everyone can drink and hang out in the spa/steamroom/sauna and then walk out to the local pubs and restaurants.
Meanwhile I see all my rural family stagnating, getting addicted to drugs, stuck on welfare, and living subjectively depressing lifestyles.
Honestly? I did too and I'm am absolutely not sold on this lifestyle at all. I told myself I wanted to try it and see what it was like for a year and I have never been more lonely before in my entire life. Unless something changes I will move back after my lease is up, because a boring life is better than a lonely life.
There are more social events, but IMO they're very surface level, people don't want any deeper connection.
> Meanwhile I see all my rural family stagnating, getting addicted to drugs, stuck on welfare, and living subjectively depressing lifestyles.
I mean you're making pretty harsh judgments about their lives. If someone lives rural and is happy, that should be good enough even if you don't want the same lifestyle.
Getting addicted to drugs? I walk past junkies literally all the time now in the city, rural areas don't have a monopoly on drug issues.
I think everyone should move away at some point of their life, but permanent city-life isn't for everyone. I simply enjoy gardening, small-scale farming, tinkering and trekking in forests way more than any services cities offer.
I think this is the key, people should experience different cultures, lifestyles, and social opportunities. I'm an introvert myself, but I'm passionate about certain topics and enjoy discussing them with people who are also passionate about them.
Finding these niche communities or people who shared my ideas was impossible for me where I grew up, which was much less densely populated than where I live now. Now I have access to additional sharing of ideas, gatherings, and social bonds that I couldn't have imagined before I came to an urban area.
I never thought of myself as a city person, but after living in a rural area, a midsize city, a huge city, and a small town, I've found that my current large to midsize city is where I thrive.
dating apps? or how?
Shouldnt be that surprising.
That reality is that it's dramatically cheaper to provide services to people that are living close to eachother.
Unless we get to a post-scarcity utopia, or someone repeals the law of economics, city services will continue to be, as a rule, better and, in relative terms, cheaper than rural ones.
This. I would ditch living in a city in a heartbeat if I could.
It's not just possible, that's exactly why. The vast majority of people live in cities because of economics, not because they inherently prefer cities.
Let's just say any town <20k people is considered rural. From what I've seen, it is almost unheard of for someone who was not raised in a rural area to successfully live long term in an area like this.
I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of seeing retirees leave the city and try to live full time in a remote cabin on a recreational lake. None of them lasted more than a couple years. A surprising number of divorces. Growing up in a small town I have plenty of similar stories of families moving in from a larger city and leaving shortly after.
I'm not exactly sure how to explain this but generally I think the challenges of rural living (weather, social, economic, isolation, etc.) are very difficult if someone isn't familiar. As you mention, people see the benefits (incredibly serene, peaceful place, etc) but I think many aren't expecting or prepared for the challenges.
One big reason is that remote work was never guaranteed to last. It's starting to crumble now with big tech requiring RTO x days a week or factoring in physical presence into performance reviews. People that aren't already independently wealthy couldn't risk buying a house in the country. In my rural home town your options for work if you lost your tech job(easier because crappy internet options) would be hard labor on a farm or dairy or maybe work at the grocery or fast food joint - nothing else.
A catw majority of people stayed in cities, or are moving back, but some did vote with their feet and left for the country.
It's important to not that it might be easy to#if hear from those that started in cities, anyone that moved more rural may be out of your field of view and seemingly not exist.
Macro-trends always contain variance which can infer an opposite micro-trend.
The housing supply is infamously constrained right now. Many counties have a cap on density which simply don't allow people to pick up and move on a whim to rural areas.
Big migrations take a long time.
Politicians are not selected today like they were when the founders lived. In rural districts, when given the choice between
A. A carpetbagger endorsed by the most recent Republican president who talks about wedge issues whose outcome has almost no impact on daily life
B. A local star who promises to make his votes cost his party a lot of pork (money for projects in his district, like keeping hospitals open), and represent his district's very specific economic interests
most districts are voting for candidate A in the primary.
We’re over 2 hours from the nearest airport (on a highway), so pretty “out there.”
Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...
https://carsey.unh.edu/publication-rural-america-lost-popula....
For example, not as many people are needed to farm, but many rural areas are attractive to new remote workers. The areas don’t necessarily overlap.
My hometown farm community has shrank dramatically, but my new rural community has been extremely successful at attracting white collar workers.
Healthcare, decent schools, used to be a problem to get fast internet, restaurants, bookstores, extracurriculars for your kids, etc.
It is indeed peaceful. It is just a lot of physical work and being in the sun. At least half the year or so.
Lots of people are leaving the cities. Many of the major cities in the US fit the definition of a failed state. Including SF.
"A failed state is a state that has lost its effective ability to govern its populace. A failed state maintains legal sovereignty but experiences a breakdown in political power, law enforcement, and civil society, leading to a state of near-anarchy." [1]
And most of them aren't moving to Flyover, Nowhere. They are moving 8 miles down Main Street, to another part of their metro area.
> definition of a failed state
You have a very strange definition of a failed state. Are there rival warlords conscripting people into their liberation armies at gunpoint? Is drinking the tap water going to kill you? Does SF have to make do with 8 to 18 hours of electricity a day? Is there no food at the grocery? Are the schools and universities open? Are there multiple acts of terrorism a week, caused by plain-clothes insurgents? Has unemployment hit 30%? Have employers stopped paying people? Are pensioners lining up on Market Street every day, to try to sell strangers their fur coats and toasters and jewelry, so they can afford to feed themselves next week? Has life expectancy dropped by a decade or so?
Gang shootings every day?
>Are pensioners lining up on Market Street every day, to try to sell strangers their fur coats and toasters and jewelry
No the pensioners couldn't afford to live there and moved out. You have immigrant people selling [stolen] toasters and shampoo on the street.
>Has life expectancy dropped by a decade or so?
Life expectancy is significantly shorter for a large segment of the population via overdose, because lawlessness pervades.
> Are the schools and universities open?
Yes I believe SF has reopened schools again, finally.
You have masses of people living on the street in tents. And rampant open air drug use and sale. Lawlessness. I suggest you re-evaluate what you are willing to tolerate.
Usually when people talk about leaving cities, it's because of the cost of living in many cities.
Plus, are people leaving cities? Click on Population Change at https://mtgis-portal.geo.census.gov/arcgis/apps/MapSeries/in... and zoom a bit. Rural America is emptying out. It's one of the reasons that services like hospitals are becoming harder to support. The counties containing Raleigh and Charlotte in North Carolina have grown by 25% and 21% while rural northeastern North Carolina is seeing double-digit declines. In Georgia, the Atlanta and Savannah metro areas are growing and there's a lot of decline in rural areas.
You might not like cities, but it's rural areas that people are leaving and it's rural areas that are failing.
Rural America, in the sense that the OP meant it - "It is just a lot of physical work and being in the sun" - effectively no longer exists. "Rural America" is largely a term used by people who live in cities for people who don't live in cities, but the latter are by and large not "rural" by historical standards.
If you fly over the midwest, what you will see in terms of land use is a large amount of farmland broken up by enormous neighborhood networks and mid-size cities. People who live here are largely not working on farms. They are commuting to office jobs, service work, or gig economy positions. They don't walk anywhere, so they're not "in the sun"; even getting to the grocery store or a friend who lives nearby is practically untenable without a car. They certainly aren't living off the land. "Rural" America is basically the leftovers of farmland, and in many locations it's actively being partitioned into subdivisions.
I lived more than half my life to this point in a "rural" area, but for me this meant ~5 unfarmable acres. Virtually everyone else I knew lived in a neighborhood (isolated from other neighborhoods by miles of driving). This lifestyle isn't the idyllic thing it's made out to be.
> Religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and outright Nazism
I don't think I'd point to rural areas specifically as the source of this problem. Instead, I'd point to the "Orange-County-ification" of the US. The heat centers for the problems you're talking about are relatively wealthy subdivisions full of people who can afford F150s that they don't need and keep small arsenals in their basements. Think people like the McCloskeys in suburban St. Louis: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53481537
As for racism - part of the truth of the "crime problem" in cities is the fact that huge segments of their populations are effectively a permanent underclass living in poverty or near-poverty.
Why is your land unfarmable? Is it dry land?
This is a massive mischaracterization. Do you have first-hand experience with these people? I specifically have an issue with your phrasing: "taking over". It may be more common, relatively, to find this sort of thing in rural areas, but that does not mean it's taking over.
Surely such an unstable and violent state must make it hard to run any kind of business. There's definitely no way any giant tech organizations would ever put offices there, much less headquarters.
Your argument is a non-sequitur.
And many large retail firms have closed down and left. I can produce citations if needed.
Even many third world locales don't have those issues.
So yes it is a reasonable definition.