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!
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
When we lived in a bigger place, we got used to going down to the massive Asian supermarket, the French bakery, the Balkan place down the street, the dirt-cheap Salvadorean/pupusa place. I admit I did start taking it for granted, then moved away and remembered, “Oh, right, they don’t have cool stuff everywhere.”
The reasons I moved from a town of 3,500 people to around 100,000 people after 2 years are
More dating options: most of the women in the small town I lived in were already in relationships or weren’t compatible. I started dating my wife a few months after I moved
Better access to services: if I wanted to get groceries on Sunday I would have to drive 30 minutes to the next town over and banks would be closed before 5. The local restaurants were good but there were only a few.
Better access to fun stuff: I train jiu jitsu and the closest gym to where I lived was a 50 minute drive 1 way and the closest 10+ mile bike trail was 30 minutes away. I would stay at my friend’s house overnight or get a hotel so I could have a decent night on the town since it was also 50 minutes away from home
There are opportunities to have fun and build a happy life in small towns but if you have niche interests then it can be a little lonely. Plus some of the activities are private so it can be harder to find them and access them.
The upside was the people there are really nice and it was really cheap to live there so I paid off a ton of debt.
Usually those places are lacking (unfortunately). Food deserts, lack of infrastructure, sometimes even poor medical facilities. Also, locations like these tend to be more conservative, and conservatives are not always the most friendly. I personally did move to a smaller area, but I don’t have a family/kids so I’m able to be more indifferent towards the lack of resources. (I also moved to the hood 👀)
Related meme:
Omfg , im stealing that meme for future use
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.
The majority of jobs simply don’t allow any sort of WFH: if it involves creating or transforming something, people have to be physically manning the tools. Healthcare can’t be WFH, education sucks when it’s fully online.
Smaller communities are great for peace and quiet, but terrible when you need anything they don’t have (or don’t have in decent quality), like jobs, transportation, healthcare and education. If you happen to be “socially weird”, you have to adapt and “unweird” yourself
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
I have found the opposite in rural Michigan (northern US). My wife’s family has a vacation home, and skilled tradespeople are slightly cheaper around there. The place is more than an hour from any large towns, but 30 minutes from several small towns.
Maybe population is distributed differently here due to the way infrastructure is funded?
Semi-unrelated: I I love Aussie slang.
Block for lot? Sparky for electrician? Whippersnipper for weedeater? Barbie for BBQ? Cunt for everything else?
Fucking YES lol I want more
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.
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.
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.
There is not enough stimulation in a small community. In the US, they are also usually full of hateful/ignorant people.
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.
“Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile.”
But that’s the thing, as the wages of workers goes down their ability to consume goes down as well. Sure they’ll never stop needing food and clothes but new cars, sushi, new TVs, vacations, preventative healthcare, higher education, etc - these things become impossible. Debt will surely be the next step to keep the engine running but that will only accelerate the transfer of wealth because debt is paid to those who have assets. And quite frankly we’re already there - university (in the US), the rise of buy now and pay later programs, healthcare the moment you need to use it - these things require massive debt today. It’ll only get worse.
As wealth gets drained from the working class into the owning class, the only meaningful consumers for the majority of goods and services will be the owning class. Services will increasingly be focused on the wealthy or on methods of serving the poor via borrowing from the rich (which only exasperates their poverty).
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 think you’re misattributing things here that I think can and should be explained by wealth inequality. Big box stores don’t kill small towns because they destroy competition, they kill small towns because some percentage of money spent at a big box store leaves that small town. It’s not the lack of competition that kills small towns it’s the fact that after those small town businesses close less wealth exists in the hands of people in that small town. There’s less money moving around in that town because a portion of it is being siphoned off to big box store profits which go to shareholders and out of state C-suites and the likes.
Yes, higher density means more taxes are raised per area which means it’s easier to spend on infrastructure in high density areas but you’re missing the point. If wealth was distributed properly we’d have enough money to build all the infrastructure we want comparatively almost regardless of the density of the population. As wealth inequality grows less taxes are being paid to the government in high density and low density scenarios. As wealth inequality grows the more the government is in debt to the wealthy and the less it can spend on vital services. There’s enough money in the system to pay for Internet and hospitals and rail and school to service every person in the US but the money isn’t held by everyone, it’s held by people who have those services covered where they are and so they don’t care if they drain the rest of the country of those things. Wealth inequality explains why small towns are dying because it explains why they can’t afford to stay open, stay profitable, stay connected, stay healthy.
And to circle back around to your original paragraphs, I don’t care how much people like living in big cities they can’t live there on vibes alone. They have to go where the money is, and you best believe when Boeing opens up a new plant in a city they put a whole lot of money into that city (ignoring city special contracts for a moment). I like living in a big city, I want to move to an even bigger city, I’m not because I don’t have a job there right now. I live where the work is. And yes, denser cities means more jobs and more opportunities but that only gets less true and less meaningful the more wealth inequality grows. If I can’t afford to rent a flat in 10 years, the same way I can’t afford to rent a house today then what’s the point? If my job doesn’t pay me meaningfully more in 10 years because stocks have to go up (please read that as wealth inequality) then what’s the point? Cities don’t create jobs or high paying jobs because money moves fast, it’s because that’s where the wealth is. Look at any major city in the US (at least) and you can find the increasingly small list of increasingly massive companies that have offices there and you can trace the money. If Kansas city lost Garmin or Hallmark they’d feel it, if the government went further into debt and had to slash services Kansas City would feel it, if one of the massive freight companies left KC would feel it. The point is cities are built on wealth and the movement of wealth, but if it increasingly is drained out of those cities it will be harder and harder to sustain those cities. It won’t matter where people like living, they’ll have to move to where the money is.
I really do think looking at where money comes from and where it’s going is critical to understanding why the standard of living is declining while there’s never been more wealth or productivity in history. We could all own homes, all have healthcare, have highspeed rail, higher education, if only the rich didn’t exist. We have to tax them out of existence and build a system that works for the overwhelming majority of people instead of the 1%.
As an American (not that it’s particularly unique from Europe) living in a city feels much better because I’m not completely tied to my car. Living in suburbs and rural areas makes it far less tenable to walk or bike anywhere. Cities are the only place with any sort of public transportation or even pedestrian infrastructure that is remotely walker-friendly. Walking is not only more physically healthy it also makes me feel better emotionally
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.
WFH isn’t available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that’s almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That’s just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.
