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Comment by esseph | Hacker News Reader

To somebody that lives rurally in the US, a town of 10,000 is where you go to get groceries. 100,000 gets you a movie theater and shopping. Pittsburgh? That's basically a megacity.

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For the more rural states you need to take a zero off each of these numbers. A town of 1,000 in North Dakota would have shops, a town of 10,000, which would be the tenth most populous in the state, would have a cinema, and Fargo, with 250k people living in its vicinity? That's your megacity.

Yes, that town of 10,000 is probably rural, and in the study I linked, people were not moving to those towns. They were moving to actual cities.

What are we even talking about here?

I can find data that points out two trends right now.

1. Decentralized growth into exurbs and rural markets. This is further driven by USDA home loans into those markets, where people can not only afford to live but buy homes 90min or less away from a metropolitan area (but living outside the metro). This move into exurbs and rural markets is reversing a 40 year trend!

2. Movement from major top-5 us cities into smaller cities with a university or two (Knoxville, TN; Boise, ID; and Tulsa, OK are seeing the highest inbound-to-outbound ratios). Major cities like New York and Los Angeles are still seeing net domestic outflows in 2026.

In fact the Yankees, Californians, and city slickers of all sorts are FLOODING into the southeast USA, and have been since they suddenly decided all at once in 2020 this is where they need to be for some reason. I've never seen so many foreigner plates in my life here in Alabama. (New York, California, etc.) Between them and the half of Mexico/Guatemala who already lives here, it's getting pretty crowded out here in rural nowheresville these days.

At least I can be thankful it's not as crowded here as East Tennessee, North Carolina, etc are getting to be. Yet. The very bad reputation of Alabama among a certain crowd seems to keep more of those types away.

The big reason people were in the cities was because of jobs. When remote work happened, all those people were still making big city pay, but could now move and live in lower cost areas (with fresh air, less crowding, etc.).

Affordable housing on big lots

We were discussing your belief that everyone in the world has a city slicker inside struggling to get out.

The views of rural people can be disregarded in favor of the superior City Person viewpoints, since that's what we're all secretly striving to become. Before long there will be nobody living in the country at all, because why would anyone want that?

No more fresh air or clean water for me. Nope, I'm moving to some city somewhere so I can enjoy living in a 300 sq. ft. luxury apartment with a pet cockroach. The only people still living out in the countryside will be my backwards hillbilly cousins, like in Hunger Games.

Is this where you believe things are headed? Because we all want to be you so much?

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