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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
Zentron @lemm.ee

Why dont more people live in smaller communities , appart from economic opportunity (WFH is making it possible if not prefferable too)

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!

65 comments

  • 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:

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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 live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It's great here.

    • I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don't need a car.
    • there's a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
    • a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that's your jam.
    • I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
    • more people means it's easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There's everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn't your vibe.
    • stuff is open later.

    Some of the things people imagine about cities aren't really true

    • it's not constant noise
    • I typically can't hear my neighbors
    • people don't typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
    • it's not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it's always times Square on NYE, but it's just not.

    While you're not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

    Some people want "more space" but I don't really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

    If I had kids, I wouldn't want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can't get anywhere on your own. Don't like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that's your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn't want to.

    • 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.
    • 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.

      • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Infintevalence pretty much nailed it

    We're country as fuck up here. Not a small town any more, but still more rural than suburban.

    While we're in driving distance of a good hospital, it's a drive, not something in town. There's just not enough people to keep a hospital in use often enough to make it reasonable in a capitalist system at all, but even in an ideal, post scarcity system, the resources to build and run hospitals are going to be best located where the most people can benefit from it.

    And pretty much everything scales the same. Why locate a big university in a town with maybe 10k people if you include outlying areas? To support that kind of endeavor, you'd need more people to do the work, so the town would get bigger because of the large undertaking.

    It's a balance. If you want to have bigger centralized services, you need more people to make it work. And, if you don't already have the population, attracting bigger things is harder, so the chances of things like public transit, resource intensive facilities, exotic supplies/foods coming there are lower.

    It results in people that value the benefits of a smaller population center over the usual benefits of a bigger center being the only ones that'll move out

  • If I could get a fully remote job and move to the middle of BFE... Well, I'm considering doing that without a remote job, and just accepting that any job I can get will take a longer commute and probably earn pay less. I lived in Chicago for more than a decade, lived in San Diego a few years. Currently I live in a rural part of my state, but the city keeps creeping nearer, and I'm seeing farms in my county get bulldozed to put in yet another housing development "..starting from the low, low $600s!" of identical, oversized, characterless houses with 1/4 acres plots of land and no trees.

    I don't want neighbors. I want trees, deer eating my hostas, raccoons trying to tear open my garbage bins, and bears being oversized raccoons. I want candles and laterns in every room because the power goes out every time there's a thunderstorm, a woodburning stove that I can feed with trees that get blown down, and enough land that I can raise goats, chickens, and do a little dirt farming, in addition to my job. I want to opt out of this goddamn rat race, and just have a quiet place where I can offer people refuge from the bullshit that's happening around us.

  • The career opportunities for my partner's career are basically only available in this region of our country.

  • I don't know, the whole being completely surrounded by backwards fucking hicks who hate my mere existence for living my life as who I actually am might have something to do with it.

    Maybe, just maybe, I like living near people who accept me for who I am and most of those people are in cities while the rural areas are filled with hate filled fucking jackasses who couldn't manage to fucking read Green Eggs & Ham even if they had a gun pointed at their head with the threat of death if they failed.

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