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Comment by ejstronge | Hacker News Reader

Curiously, rural regions of the US have a fair amount of power due to how electoral seats are distributed. I'm not sure if this is also true in Canada, so it is possible that the GP's situation differs from your own experiences.

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They're also heavily subsidized to make them "work", a considerable piece of rural America would already be gone if there wasn't a large amount of government funds being diverted to keep it alive and we will spend even more as it becomes less and less desirable to live there.

As soon as WFH became an option people flocked away from cities. NYC lost 200k people over two years; SF lost 60k. I would say there is a large population of city folk who desire to move to more rural areas.

If you listen to the news, they're all moving to other cities, like Austin, TX, not to rural areas.

Yes. Other/smaller cities, college towns, etc. I'm sure some have taken the opportunity to move somewhere that looks more like rural--but I have to believe the lifestyle shift would be a bridge too far for most.

They're moving to suburbs near big cities or cheap big cities in less populated states, not rural areas.

>suburbs near big cities

It's not really true of the Bay Area--and it's at least complicated around Manhattan. But a lot of cities like Boston an hour or an hour and a bit drive in reverse commute, much less weekend, traffic can bring you to a lot cheaper housing. There are expensive suburbs too. However, it's pretty easy to find suburban or exurban towns that are accessible to Boston for an evening event that have relatively modest home prices. Not Midwest cheap but reasonable. (Of course there are very expensive towns as well.)

Well yes, when an area is heavily subsidized it can be attractive to live there.

Sure but what would that have to do with subsidization?

What’s the GDP of New York City versus upstate?

As an aside this silly concept of “rural/urban divide” is just that.

Silly.

We need farms and farmers to feed us, it’s ok to subsidize some of these places so that happens.

It’s also ok for the people doing the subsidization to ask the rural people to stop complaining about “socialism” or other nonsense when they’re the primary benefactors of handouts.

What would the GDP of NYC be, if NYC didn't have a near monopoly on the proximity to high paying jobs in NY State? If every NYC job (aside from those that absolutely required people to work on-site) allowed full time WFH, my bet is that it would be significantly lower. And people with high paying wages would be more scattered around the state, requiring less subsidizing. It would also mean that not every highly educated person moves away to the city. Part of the reason urban and rural politics is so divided is that every smart kid from a small town goes away to college and never comes back. Some because they have no desire, but others because the job they want doesn't exist outside a metro.

There may be some element of truth to that, but jobs aren’t the only reason why highly employable young people tend to move to urban areas. There’s other big reasons, like there being a lot more to things to do and a vastly wider variety of large hobby/interest communities and cultures in urban areas.

This is why the bulk of people moving away from city centers during the pandemic moved to cheaper cities or the suburban metros surrounding cities rather than small towns, and unless small towns stop being small towns it’s not going to change.

Idk, but you're intentionally responding as though you missed the point so I don't have much else to say here.

This is about suburbs, not rural areas, but Canadian politics provides an interesting history in suburbanites wresting power from city dwellers. Among other concrete impacts it means more parking, shifting funds away from public transport (which is less useful to suburbanites), etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgamation_of_Toronto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkO-DttA9ew&t=35s

I'm guessing New York farmers don't have as much power as their Montana cousins.

Rural and low population _states_ have a fair amount of power due to having a fixed number of senators per state, but rural areas in an otherwise non-rural state may find themselves outvoted and thus mostly irrelevant.

The opposite situation, city slickers outvoted by country bumpkins, is of course possible in rural states.

This obviously varies by state, but tends to not be accurate at the state level either due to the way state legislatures are elected.

For example, in my state the majority of residents live in the largest metro area. But the smaller towns & rural areas are able to more or less permanently control the legislature (because legislators have geographic districts). As a result, our laws are frequently written in ways that are openly hostile to our major city, while favoring more rural areas.

You're 100% right, the more rural your state the more power your state holds in Presidential elections, and indirectly in the Senate, but not much beyond that. I don't think there's a corollary in Canada but I could certainly be wrong.

Nominally, it's also true in Canada. Due to lower populated rural ridings, one rural vote can be worth up to 4X an urban vote.

But in current conditions, votes in rural Western Canadian ridings are basically worthless. They're ultra-safe Conservative seats, so they can be and are ignored.

But it wasn't very long ago that they were highly competitive ridings split between two right wing parties. Because Canada doesn't quite have the same 2 party system as the US does, the situation isn't as static.

That’s true of states that are as a whole relatively rural (think Wyoming) but not, say, upstate NY.

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