> Remote work couldn't have solved anything.

It couldn't solve everything, that doesn't mean it can't solve anything.

My experience in rural areas (northern canada) has been the opposite of yours.

Locals welcome remote workers because the alternative is bidding up housing over vacation homes that sit empty.

Remote workers give back to the community through civic engagement and injecting their income into it year round. Anyone not in that mindset of integrating with the community typically doesn't stay past their first winter.

Locals are also the ones to decide if/when/where they advertise real estate to outsiders. Locals always get first dibs via word of mouth so there isn't as much resentment.

But maybe that is the difference between rural communities and remote communities?

I grew up in a rural area, where everyone has a southern accent, which sounds like nothing but music to me. My relatives tend to live next to expanses of farmland, as I myself previously lived for years. Although I’ve recently moved to the city that’s about 45 minutes from where I grew up—-due to a return-to-office policy and also managing to use years of experience to land a solid software job in my home state—-I regularly drive out through woods and fields to spend time with people to whom I mean a great deal more than I ever will to any employer. Having a larger salary than most doesn’t change who I am in the least. I am one of those very people for whom you claim to speak.

My family was heartbroken over the years that I lived away from them. At times, they wondered what they might have done wrong to cause me to leave them. Moving away from my roots, to pursue my only job offer after undergrad, was the opposite of social cohesion. Many of my peers from high school——the size of my graduating class was 69——do not make anywhere near my income, and none of them feel any resentment towards me about it, just like they don’t resent the farmers who own hundreds of acres of farmland (my tech salary doesn’t come close to what some rural people make) or the classmates who went to medical school or got their JD. If anything, we feel mutual pride for what one another has accomplished. (The accomplishment, in fact, is not the money, but in living true to one’s values and contributing to something greater than yourself, something I was at times forced to betray to work in software.) I feel that your sampling method didn’t pick up on something really crucial about small, rural communities, where people tend to grow up together and to know one another for life, in continuation of multi-generational relationships among their families.

Rural areas will do just fine if people like myself choose to live modestly among people they care about, in a county that doesn’t even have the convenience of a grocery store, instead of in one of the most expensive places on earth.

Yes, if I moved back to my home town and spent time around my family and friends I also would be welcomed since I’m not an outsider.

I’m not talking about people who previously had roots that came back home as a wayward son. Those people, including me, will get a pass as we are one of the good ones. Especially (and maybe only) so because we’ve kept up relations and close ties over the interceding years and we are currently few and far between.

However, I’m fairly confident in my sampling bias on this one. I am close enough to people where they are willing to talk freely and the tenor is not great. Perhaps I simply have a bubble of especially negative folks, and maybe your area of the country is different. There was already a large current of resentment towards the white collar professionals prior to covid and I can only say that it’s accelerated quite a bit since. I only recently was able to spend considerable time around places like where I grew up.

We are not generally a single generation away from “moving away from the farm” at this point in the country. Many are generations removed. And it doesn’t need to be absolutely middle of nowhere either on this one. If you’re a curiosity for the area you typically won’t have an issue. It’s when you hit a critical mass of “haves” vs the “have nots” that the problems spring up. And many folks resent the people who don’t have to “work for a living” sitting at home all day. It’s about a shared experience and “in this together” feeling that most knowledge workers will simply not endenger.

If tech elites are making this call on behalf of generations-old communities, what jobs they’re allowed to have locally——sounds a little like a communist, planned economy, where some districts are assigned to have certain gainful opportunities and others are assigned to not have them——based on their own value judgements and informal conversations, it’s the height of arrogance for them to reason that only they can keep the social structure from fracturing in a tight-knit community of which they were never a part.

Why not put it to a vote at the community level, out of respect for community autonomy, economic freedom, and democratic values? I can tell you that the people who are close enough to their children for them to want to stay around would never say no to a job opportunity that lets them do just that without sacrificing their career to do so. To boot, these communities generally have been home to at least some remote workers for decades already, but much of tech has fallen ill to narcissism in believing that it is somehow too special / important to also provide such an opportunity.

The majority of people who choose to live in their hometown, over a flashier place that they could also afford, are doing it out of love for their community, not out of some anti-social tendency to take advantage of it as you suggest. Perhaps some decision makers, somewhere, got where they are through a self-selection bias, and are projecting their own psychological quirks onto others.

There are a great many people whose families have roughly stayed put for generations. Your reasoning / dismissiveness / lack of care for these people shows a lack of insight or a tendency to marginalize the concerns of people from rural America.