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.
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.)
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.
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.