Just the title
Seen lots of people moving to big places , but im from a small town and id go back there in a heartbeat if i had WFH option (not possible with current job)
To clarify, im a European and its a question for everyone , not just americans!
Australian here; I much prefer living away from cities. I like having a big house on a big block with lots of nature and as few other people around me as possible.
The catch is while the housing and land is wayyyy cheaper, other stuff is more expensive and inconvenient. The biggest thing people don’t consider is trades people; you’ll have plumbers, sparkies etc just refuse to even come out when they find out you’re more than half an hour away from civilisation, and if they do come out they charge for the travel.
My mom came from a small town and said she’d never raise a kid in a small town - her cousins, all save one, were in jail or pregnant before they graduated high school. Because there was literally nothing to do.
I like having restaurants, a good library system, concerts, bars, not needing to drive to get anything. I like living in a mid-sized city, but if I couldn’t, would go bigger not smaller.
There is not enough stimulation in a small community. In the US, they are also usually full of hateful/ignorant people.
I don’t like conservative communities, i get threatened for not being a white man
All small communities left in the US are just the angry conservatives who were too stubborn to leave.
As someone who has lived in a couple of small places before, for me it’s accessibility. The first place I lived at for the longest since birth pretty much, there were so few places to go to. You had to kill 45 miles back and to, to get anywhere and that ate a lot of gas to do so. My place of origin, didn’t really put anything interesting down that would attract more people to want to go to, converse in or conduct commerce in. Yeah the small community may have bonded people together, but it was all still relatively small.
Where I am at now, it feels bigger, there’s more opportunity around and everything. I’m having a bit of a difficult time imagining where I could go if I decide to move that equals where I’m living now.
I’ve personally been thriving since moving to a big city. I never want to go back to the middle of nowhere. I enjoy urban exploration, I love the diversity of business and people, and I love the sheer amount of community that exists. I love that there’s always new things to find. That just doesn’t exist outside of cities.
Because they don’t know how to do a spreadsheet for household budget.
Once you see the numbers all laid out, living in a small town is usually better in NA.
If you measure your life only in dollars, maybe. Maybe.
Only certain things cost more in cities like housing. Other things are basically the same price, especially with online options. You get paid more, which means your 401k match is more money. There’s more opportunities in cities and services like schools are generally much better because of better funding.
Yeah, if you’re childfree and wfh, it’s probably worth it to move to a lcol area. But there are a lot of things to consider.
Average income is about 60k, I can’t see a way past the triple cost for housing to make up for the comparatively tiny hit you’ll take in income.
To live in a city, you’re looking at 4k a month for a 3bdrm. Small town you’re looking at 1.5k. The 2.5k difference is 30k more per year for housing.
I just don’t see a 60k person making 90k just to live in a city.
A $30k person in a town could be making $60k in a city. With two incomes, that’s an extra $30k/yr.
Bullshit. McDonald’s workers don’t make 60k in a city bro.
It’s even cheaper to live in the woods!
I don’t drive. Where I live, you can really only “not drive” in cities. And even then, it can be hard at times.
At the same time, I live within reasonable commuting distance of multiple friends and family members. I can walk to a few of them. I don’t need to be closer to my community.
I might want to retire someplace quieter, but I like being able to hop on a train or a bus to get to somewhere fun, or to be able to walk across the street to a store if I need something. Heck, I can even easily get takeout if I don’t feel like cooking – I don’t even need delivery.
I can even easily get takeout if I don’t feel like
And I’ll take that up a notch. I currently live in a small city outside a large one, and I can walk to get takeout, from
- American diner
- Greek kebabs
- Pakistani kebabs
- several Indian restaurants
- several Chinese restaurants
- several Mexican restaurants
- at least one Salvadoran
- at least one Chilean
- some sort of African thing I haven’t yet tried
- …… and so many more
Our new family activity for pandemic was to walk for takeout from the new Punjabi restaurant, and eat dinner on a bench in the town common…… try that in your small town
The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.
Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to go where they’d like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.
The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.
The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes.
Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile. They just park a higher percentage of their wealth in wealth-generating financial assets, which leech wealth from the rest of society.
We need a tax on all registered securities, (with exemption for the first $10 million owned by a natural person.) That tax should be paid not in cash, but in shares of the security: the IRS should slowly liquidate those shares over time, such that IRS sales never constitute more than 1% of total traded volume.
We further need the punitively-high top-tier tax rate we had for most of the 20th century. That tax rate pushed businesses to spend their excess income, turning it into other people’s paychecks. It discouraged the kind of wealth-hoarding investment that is stunting consumer spending.
You’re being incredibly over dramatic. Plenty of businesses thrive off of mostly middle or lower income customers.
Cities are just better. Rich or no rich, larger amounts of people means more restaurants and things to do.
I don’t think I am being over dramatic, I’d love to know what specifically you think isn’t grounded or reasonable.
Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I’m talking about a slope here - a velocity. “Increasingly…” means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we’ll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there’s 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.
More restaurants in cities because there’s more money in cities because there’s more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It’s all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.
Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can’t build that infrastructure because… of a lot of reasons, but I’d argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it’s only getting worse.
It’s why populism is so popular right now. It’s why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It’s why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it’s why if they’re not careful they’ll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.
Wealth inequality is everything.
Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer,
This part specifically is the what I was referring to. Basically, I feel as though you’re overemphasizing the “rich” aspect of why people live in cities. Tons of people just like being around other people.
The faster money flows, the more expensive jobs can be provided, and in the country side money moves slower. Wages being higher in cities isn’t because that’s where the rich are; it’s because there’s more places to spend money, so everything changes hands quicker and “creates” more money.(While I do think that plenty of modern econ is bunk bullshit, that’s one concept that rings true).
While I do agree that the rich kills small towns, I think it’s primarily a different reason—big box stores like walmart and medium boxes like dollar general using abusive price practices like undercutting using their wealth to push out the smaller competition, and make it nigh impossible for new places to get going.
Wealth inequality is quite meaningful, but I think it’s far from everything. There’s a lot of smaller reasons why cities tend to be better places to live, that don’t have to do with the rich.
One good example is that higher density means more gov $ per sqrmile, even if the people are poorer, and more infrastructure can be shared, making it cheaper to build. That results in cities inevitably having better infrastructure than the countryside
I remember some guy, anthropologist or something like that, was trying to figure out why it was that people in cities made on average more money than people in small towns or rural areas, until it hit him: That’s why cities exist in the first place.
TL;DR: capitalism.
I’ve put some thought into this and I don’t have a good answer other than because of how society is designed to keep us from doing it now.
Evolutionarily speaking, we are designed to thrive in smaller communities. It’s only in the more recent part of humanity that we seem to have moved away from that. I mean, there were still cities a long time ago, but within them were what could be thought of as smaller communities.
I myself am of European descent, but currently live in a place where there is a thriving native community and realizing that I sometimes have envy of some of their ways of life is what got me thinking.
For instance, in western society becoming elderly is almost seen as a problem, like a burden that needs to be “dealt” with. For them it is a station of respect and reverence. If an Elder walks down the street, they are taught to show respect and pay heed to their wisdom and guidance. If the rest of us are lucky, we can get a seniors discount at select stores by declaring they we are among the needy.
I’ve even went as far as researching communal living, intentional communities and cooperative housing, but I keep chickening out when it comes time to pull anything into action.
The idea of finding 4-6 like-minded families to share resources with and use our individual talents and skills to help each other really appeals to me. It makes sense to build resilience against harder times.
But to answer your question, smaller communities helping each other is against the capitalist ideal and is/will be thwarted at any scale by corporations and corporate influenced governments alike at every turn. So I guess that’s the most likely reason.
Be careful. Having ownership of your resources allows you to take your stuff, or sell it, and try something else somwhere else. If all the resources are communal, it is harder to escape if the things go south. One of the reasons why is it difficult to leave certain kind of cults.
Absolutely, which is why cooperative corporate structure appealed to me. Everyone has there same stake in it and still maintains their own separate lives. Only things that are agreed upon as shareable would be shared.
Like bulk food, equipment, etc.
Seniors who show they deserve respect should be given it. But plenty do not.
I hear you and agree, but part of me wonders if that is solely because they were always nasty people, or they are actually reacting to the awful way they get treated.
They are already probably dealing with failing health, burying most of their friends, not understanding most of what is going on in the world, feeling left behind, etc.
In their shoes I’m not sure if I could be very cheerful myself. Maybe I’ll get the opportunity to find out and hopefully I’ll not be one of the ones you mention, but who knows.
Most of us are tired from all the crap of the world already, imagine 30-40 more years of that on top of the things I just mentioned.
European
As an American, it’s because there’s nothing out there. We have SO much land. A small town means you have to drive everywhere. It means the local grocery is 30 min away. It also means 300 people in the town, one library (maybe), but at least three churches. Very much not my vibe :-)
Not everywhere, obviously, but it’s a thing.
I live in a city of over 100,000 people and my grocery store is 25 minutes away. About an hour if I walk.
I grew up in a small town and had two grocery stores within 8 minutes. Everything was a lot more expensive and there was less selection.
Moved because of the lack of services (no hospital, volunteer FD and ambulance, no high school, no college nearby, no taxi service, no bus service, everything shut down at 6 PM).
I feel you on that.
I live in a town of about 71,000 The nearest grocery store which is a little bit more expensive is seven minutes by car. The other one that’s a little bit less expensive is about 15 to 20 minutes by car.
Out of curiosity, what region are you in? I live in a city of ~80,000 in the northeastish US and I’m not even sure it’s possible to be more than 5 or 10 minutes from a grocery store here.
West… there’s a lot more sprawl here AND rush hour traffic that lasts half the day, even on weekends.
Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
Don’t worry they conveniently forgot too.
That plus other services like rural hospitals and education are huge drawbacks to living in most of rural America.
Also a bunch of other issues with small town living like lack of privacy/anonymity, entertainment, restaurants, government services, etc… And these problems get more severe the smaller the community.
But people really did spread out to smaller towns during COVID. Property values went crazy in a lot of small towns around me.
I live in a small mountain town, and property values went apeshit. Like a house/cabin that was $150-250k is now $4-500k. It’s insane.
Privacy and anonymity is definitely still a thing as long as you keep you business to yourself, because as I’m guessing you’re alluding to, people are pretty chatty as it is and a smaller population makes it more difficult. It also helps to not be an asshole and give people even more to talk about, especially when most everyone knows each other.
Even without direct interaction, it’s easier to know someone as “the guy in the cabin on hillside road with the blue Honda CRV and the beard”. I assume that’s what the comment meant since they tied privacy to anonymity
I mean yeah, it’s not uncommon to know where each other live, there’s also that unspoken respect of leave people alone. Also yet another reason to not be an asshole in a small town lol.
Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?
It’s actually happened multiple times…
I remember two off the top of my head, but it’s possible there was a couple more
I’m weird as fuck. Other people who are as weird as fuck as me are possible to be found, but a small community makes it unlikely if not impossible. People as weird as me can only really be found in a big enough place with enough people.
And yeah, there’s also just much more to do than in a smaller town. Taking 30-45 minutes to arrive at something you wanna do is a significant hurdle compared to 5-10 minutes.
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Poor infrastructure in many of these communities, and no way to get to larger towns and cities without a car. So you’re stuck with crappy chain stores and terrible quality food, harming your health. And it’s boring, because it can’t support many kinds of entertainment.
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Smaller communities tend to skew towards conservatives, and there’s little way to escape from it (due to the distances and the lack of high speed rail). So expect more religiosity, more discrimination, and politicians that are even shittier than the average.
Huh , i forgor about americans and their shit-frastracture … im from europe and our villages/small towns are dying even tho most of what you said isnt true for us.
Idk whats it about , as most people my age (late 20s early 30s) want to live in a smaller town nearby but noone is moving there just staying in the big cities.
I think you need to specify your European country, because small French villages have awful infrastructure while their cities have amazing infrastructure.
But even here in the Netherlands, if I’d live in a village and I wanted to go to another village further away I’d need to take the train to the nearest city and then take another train to said village. This often takes much longer than by car. Also, while basic shopping needs like a supermarket, greengrocer and some basic repair shops might be there (maybe just the supermarket) you don’t have access to… Anything else really, and need to take the car there, too. Sadly, necessary non-commercial facilities like hospitals and higher education are also missing from most villages here.
Yeah, even in the Randstad, for distances up to like 15 km it’s often faster to cycle somewhere than take public transport.
Well, I lived in such conditions most of my adulthood before having a kid to care for, and it was possible precisely because it was just me. Either it was a small town not even close to a big city, or it was a small town at the outskirts of a big city, some 20-30km away. I loved it. Still do.
But it’s so hard to uproot once you have all the other stuff like not only your own job, but also your partner’s. And kid’s school or daycare or whatever. And then having to work out the bus routes for the small humans and figure whether or not it’d be plausible for them to adjust to that and not get burned out or lost or confused or whatever.
And once you need more space, it’s much harder to find places to rent in the small towns. Mostly for sale, if it’s beyond two bedrooms. And in that case it’s much more complicated since you need to go to the effort of getting the place evaluated, arranging the loans and finances so you can pull it off, and that’s a big decision since it’ll probably lock you in there for quite some while, because small towns don’t move houses fast if you decide to go, so you could be looking at years before you get the sale done and another mortgage.
It’s just so hard. Once you are in the city, it’s hard to leave. And the more you root in the city, the harder it gets.
I hate it. I hate the city. I hate most about it.
But I love my family and would suffer in a city until my death if that’s what it takes to keep it together.
But as a positive anecdote, in my life prior to rooting down, as a younger and more adventurous human, I found that maintaining a community and a good group of friends even somewhat far away from the rest of them is easy and most importantly, comes easy. Its natural. I never found community a problem, because I always had a few groups of friends and it was always enough for us to touch ground together only monthly or every other month, so our location wasn’t really a concern. Most of us lived apart anyway. And the actual day-to-day sense of community came from work or uni or that kind of thing. I was never alone, though I lived blissfully far from most everyone.
So the only thing that really makes it difficult is trying to find a way and a good timing for not only one, but three+ people to move at once with all of them being happy with it. That’s a puzzle I’ve found near impossible to crack.
If we had a lot of money saved or good enough jobs to get a nest egg going, the problems likely wouldn’t matter and could very easily be worked around. But alas, we are just lower middle class, and while we are well enough off, moving is a completely life changing and paradigm shifting thing. It’s not something to choose lightly.
Maybe that plays a part within your group of acquaintances too? My work is even WFM and my partner could likely commute easily from most of the options we have within 100km. So technically we have a lot going for it. Should be easier.
But it’s not. Life is complex.
Edit: For context, I’m in Europe too.
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