As a nerd who also married a doctor and went rural -
1) Doctors tend to make more money in rural areas. Hospitals/practices tend to offer higher salaries/bonuses/etc in order to draw talent. My wife makes roughly 50% more in an area of 30,000 people (mind you, we're talking a pretty large geographic area) than she would in Miami.
2) Money goes further. My 4500sq ft home on 1.2 acres of land is worth considerably less than my previous 1700sq ft townhome on .1 acre of land back in northern Virginia near DC.
personal opinion:
3) Some of us just don't want to live in a city. A weekend trip to a city a couple of times a year is enough for me.
As yet another nerd married to a doc in a rural area (Hines, OR, 90 min south of GP's John Day, and similarly remote), I'll also point out that rural docs have a broader scope of practice - to some extend they make more money because they do some work that is done by specialists in urban and suburban areas.
I'd add that my wife really loves the scope of practice - she does literally everything from delivering babies (w/an occasional C-section) to gerontology, from addiction medicine to ER. This just doesn't happen elsewhere.
And we like the space. The road we live on ends in a wilderness area, the hiking and X-C skiing and so on is amazing. And both us and our 6 year old love having sheep and alpacas and a dozen chickens and a greenhouse. Hobby farming like this just doesn't work in Seattle.
We miss live shows and restaurants and all the city stuff, but for now at least we like this more.
It seems a lot of people “suffer” from the problem of wanting to live in a nice rural area without a lot of people or hassles but then want most of the same amenities of large cities.
And by working remotely and exploiting the situation it never occurs to them to open up their own business/ grocery store.
I’m sure other people that live in those areas would love to have a well stocked grocery store as well.
Yes, and then they often blame "the system" (could either be corporations or the government, or both) for the natural outcome of living in an area without many people, which is that there are fewer useful services around, or that they're more expensive.
Rural America as it is, is already heavily subsidized by urban America, but it's common for people to say that we're leaving them behind, when even as it is they're being carried along. Collectively speaking, rural Americans are extremely dependent people.
I don't believe that rural Americans are any more or less dependent than urban Americans. It is just different. In a lot of places there just isn't enough population density to have everything.
Obesity statistics, proximity to healthcare - and relatedly - life expectancy, insurance coverage, taxes paid, and average job provider (for some rural towns, you'll notice the upper middle class families work in public sector (post office, government, schools, hospitals, public works)
In addition to the mentioned ESA air travel subsidy the federal government subsidizes a lot of programs for only rural citizens.
https://www.usda.gov/topics/rural
Along with the USPS mandate to provide service at a loss to rural Americans.
Of course this is probably result of US Senate and house giving a bit more power to states with more rural citizens in federal elections
They absolutely are subsidized and dependent. Rural areas receive far more in government spending, in social welfare and roads and whatnot, than they receive.
The sad part is that they think urban areas are the dependent ones. They want to think of themselves as ruggedly independent compared to city slickers, so the willful ignorance runs deep.
I don’t think I know any “rural person” who is complaining or even speaks about “being left behind”. Just my data point, but I grew up in rural America and still have lots of connections, so your claim is, uh, surprising to say the least. Maybe the impression of “rural Americans” you received while in the Bay Area / Munich was less than accurate?
I grew up in the backwoods as well. My parents are getting up in years and at some point they will have to move closer to a city just because there is no healthcare near where they live. My father had a health scare earlier this year and they couldn't even get an ambulance to pick him up.
Everything worked out but that made them think that living out in the middle of nowhere was going to have to come to an end soon.
Seriously? A huge cultural meme when it comes to Trump being elected was this idea that rural America was disaffected and disheartened because it had been 'left behind' economically.
Another example, every once in a while you'll see an article or a politician talking about what a tragedy it is that broadband is more expensive/worse in rural America, and how we need to, say, support some government program to fix that through subsidies. Usually said articles will include some quotes from people who are in relevant areas. I'll see comments on articles -- including places like HN -- talking about how satellite internet operators are "price gouging" people for mediocre speeds.
But I admit that I'm far from an expert on this topic, it would be interesting to read studies or polls on how people in rural areas feel about this.
Don't believe all of the cultural memes that you see on TV. I think the reason that the smaller population areas were dissatisfy was the outcome of globalism and off-shoring of jobs.
Your second sentence goes right along the lines of the above post; outsourcing, globalism, corporate farms, the recession -- all caused job losses in America, and for the most part (at least up to 2016) the new service, sales, and technology jobs moved to more urban locations.
Fun Fact; post 2008 recession was the first time since the depression that many food banks saw more need in suburban and rural areas than inner city.
I'd say it's less about feeling "left behind" and more about feeling like they're being attacked and hated.
Whether that's the kind of "attacked" that sounds like Obama saying they "cling to their guns and their religion" (that is, personal attacks), or the kind of attack where policies are created intentionally to harm them (like subsidizing international shipping and trade, or free trade deals which had the direct consequence of shipping many of their jobs overseas).
Of course, like all topics, the truth is more complicated than the meme, but these are the kinds of feelings you'll hear about if you start listening to Trump voters.
> Seriously? A huge cultural meme when it comes to Trump being elected was this idea that rural America was disaffected and disheartened because it had been 'left behind' economically.
I don't know where this meme came from, but I don't think it was from rural people and to the extent that it's true, I think it's more a response to the contempt ruralites have felt from the urban elite (ranging from the incessant depictions of rural America as backward and racist to the general neglect with respect in response to the most recession to the pro-illegal-immigration stance which entails competition for the rural/poor and cheap labor for the urban/elites).
Another problem with your argument is the attitude of "why do you choose to live there?" implies that people elected to move to rural areas in a time when these globalization issues were reasonably foreseeable, and it implies that it's trivial for everyone (including the rural poor) to uproot their lives and move to a city.
I think it's mostly about racism /tribalism and lack of decent education. The stuff about being left behind is just air cover to make it harder to hear the dog whistles. Disclosure: I live in a rural US location. Oh and I built my own Internet (last 10 miles) because the subsidies are all tailored to big companies who already have plenty money.
Because for every one or two fantastically wealthy-beyond-all-belief-for-the-area technologist who moves in, five people who don't have a job like that leave the region in search of something that pays an income. A lot of these bucolic rural areas with a few thousand people in a county exist because of an industry that was present decades ago that has now collapsed. So, sure, the property is cheap and the town is relatively uncomplicated...but people who don't make six figures (and, thus, can pretty much choose to live wherever we want) are leaving because the opportunities are gone. One or two tech-paycheck-family households can't sustain a set of businesses that had 7,000 potential customers before.
I've watched this happen with where my parents grew up and in my grandparents' hometowns before them. Everyone I know in Seattle who isn't in tech didn't move to Seattle to get a tech job; they moved from Idaho and Utah and eastern Oregon and eastern Washington to find work because their sub-10,000-person towns are (in some cases literally) drying up and blowing away yet, even here, they're being pushed out because of salaries. Yes, I'm leading into wealth inequality and it having gotten so bad that people are squeezed on the starting end because the towns where they grew up are collapsing and squeezed on the destination end because trying to live where the jobs are increasingly doesn't result in the level of income required to actually live there.
But those of us in tech can simply decamp to our 5,000sqft houses on three acres of land and pull in Silicon Valley wages in a Montana property market and feel quite clever. I don't blame the individual who makes this decision but it still seems quite perverse.
Oh, I know - I meant it rhetorically basically. If the last grocery store failed I'm not likely to think it's a good idea to start another.
And I suppose I do feel a bit clever (though in my case it's a ~500 sqft house on a few acres - quirky and cheap) but mostly am just angry that the city decided it was OK to add thousands and thousands and thousands of good jobs and ~0 homes.
I always like using the example of minimalism. It really only works when a small number of people do it. If everyone did it the economy would collapse. And the coffee shops would be unusable because everyone would be in there trying to use the Wifi.
If enough people with six-figure incomes moved in to a small town, they could revive a grocery store there.
The problem is that they try to live as much away from other such people as possible, to keep the low prices and the feeling of living in an extremely uncrowded countryside.
For what it's worth I prefer the city. I miss the city. I moved to a tiny town for one single reason: it's insanely cheap. So cheap I can buy a house, decide to move somewhere in a few years, and just keep the old house around in case in case I need it in the future Instead of giving my money to my landlord I can keep it. Ironically this might mean I can afford to move to the city in a few years.
More people joining in would be really nice, actually.
John Day and the area around it are gorgeous. For the price of a nice home in Portland, you can have a home and acreage. Room to garden, enjoy the outdoors, and nice people. I visit there every spring, and think about it. Then I see how horrible 4g coverage is with the hills and valleys, and how slow most of the wisp are...
Starlink might really change things for rural internet
