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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seniors who show they deserve respect should be given it. But plenty do not.
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.
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
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 career opportunities for my partner’s career are basically only available in this region of our country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization?wprov=sfla1
See “Causes” and the link to rural flight.
No modern housing due to NIMBYs here in the UK. A smaller community means renting a tiny attic, basement or god forbid house sharing a room in a partitioned victorian mcmansion for £1k a month or more. In my experience you will also have absolutely psycho neighbours over and over and over.
Trains will be dog shit in the south and you won’t get anywhere fast or reliably and you will pay £50 for the pleasure, the cars are too expensive to have, and nobody wants to sit in traffic. If you’re LGBTQ it’s only a matter of time if you get hatecrimed.
If you talk to anyone you’ll get the cops called on you because talking to strangers is very weird in those communities.
There are insane cliques on Facebook filled with elderly with too much time on their hands who will conspire to attack specific street buskers or Starbucks baristas for being overly “gormless”.
Having a nice hill to stare into fields at is okay, but most likely it’ll be filled with dogs and all those fields and beautiful “”“nature”“” will be privately owned as well.
I live in a small rural community (up North) and don’t find any of this to be true, except for the trains bit (I drive so don’t really use trains) and maybe the Facebook bit as I’ve never used it. The housing is cheaper than it is in the nearby cities and towns. My village has queer people, young, old, ethnic minorities, and pretty much everyone gets on. The whole cops thing isn’t true at all; small communities by and large have friendlier and more welcoming people than cities in my experience. And countryside is objectively a nicer environment than urban sprawl, and better for you to boot. The view from the back of mine is fields with cows and woods, and I’d take that over a train line or tower block any day of the week.
