There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.
…
America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.
According to a recent Agriculture Department estimate, the rural population did rebound by 0.25 percent from 2020 to 2022 as some families decamped from urban areas during the pandemic.
But demographers say they are still evaluating whether that trend will continue, and if so, where. Pennsylvania has been particularly afflicted. Job losses in the manufacturing and energy industries that began in the 1980s prompted many younger families to relocate to Sun Belt states. The relocations helped fuel population surges in places like Texas and Georgia. But here, two-thirds of the state’s 67 counties have experienced a drop in population in recent years.
The town I was born in is dying and its been going on since I was a kid. They were a wood mill town with three plants. They have made every bad decision that they could make. Turned down a paper mill and college before I was born. Turned down two manufacturing plants and a wal-mart after I was born. Consistently resisted chain restaurants and stores even after I had grown up and left. Then the world changed, manufacturing and new opportunities dried up completely and they still cling to the old way of doing things because they can’t see they are the problem.
Now its just a shell full of empty lots and rotting houses. The local mayor is still associated with the old families but still is only interested in protecting what they have. They keep getting elected and the place continues to deteriorate. In their minds its due to people like me leaving and all the poor and their children who are still clinging to bones of that town. Not their fault though. How could it be? They are better than everyone else.
This is the state of far too many small towns in the US today.
This rural Pennsylvania town could get a huge population boom if they had a “we welcome queer people and migrants and we don’t tolerate hate” policy they announced to the world.
But of course, that’s way too far for them.
The 1% can make their own wage slaves
I’m honestly concerned about this. No need for most people if you can just build your own labor.
They say neither Pennsylvania nor the nation can afford to lose small towns and the institutions that power them.
Lol, why?
Not only are they a touchstone of American life,
Very often a hard and poverty stricken life.
but they are also key to driving certain sectors of the economy, like agriculture.
What’s stopping farms from being built next to suburbs or even within cities with the tech we have now.
These boomers are why over romanticizing how “good” small town life was. What they’re really sad about is disproportionate political power our anti democratic electoral college gave them and the unchecked tin pot dictatorships they often held over small towns. Being able to get away with literal murder sometimes because they personally knew the cops and judges.
They couldn’t care less about the poor quality of life that most citizens of these small towns had. If they did they would have made the necessary investments to attract people (like a handful of small towns have).
Possible tin hat explanation: Suburbs/small towns lean conservative so preserving them is essential for conservatives to retain power.
Remote work.
Build homes in the echoes of cities instead of gentrifying shit holes.
Repurpose the corporate offices into affordable housing to fix the growing homelessness problems.
Create less car dependent infrastructure
Make more high density areas car free, and build affordable housing over the parking areas.
Subsidize farms if they use green tech. Subsidize them more if they’re smaller to reincitiveize small farms.
Abolish any ability for any corporation from owning any land not zoned for corporate use. Corporations may not own homes.
Did I mention remote work?
Sadly, if you can remotely work from rural America, you can remotely work from rural India.
No duh. Have you ever been out there? Sure, it’s pretty, but that’s it. Absolutely nothing to do. Except meth. Oh, and drunk driving and KKK rallies.
Not hyperbole. If someone pointed a gun at me and told me that they would shot me if I don’t agree to move back to my sub-500 people Northern Appalachian village I would help that mother fucker load the gun.
Word
I see you’ve been to my hometown.
The other person that replied did mention a lot of cool things you can do in a rural community. But being half an hour from a grocery store that has something I actually want at a price that’s reasonable (as reasonable as groceries get, I guess) sucks.
Fucking exactly.
Oh, I need bread, shit. Gotta get in the car and drive 60 miles an hour for 25 minutes each way. Great.
And yet real estate prices remain at all time highs. Boomers asked for this.
Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.
Rural living was never cheap. When you factor in the lower salaries it was always always going to be the more expensive choice.
Plus the driving all over the place. That costs time in addition to the money.
This is because of SOCIALISM! And if not Socialism it’s because of IMMIGRANTS WHO DON’T EVEN LIVE IN THESE COMMUNITIES! But it 100% is NOT due to Racism or Capitalism killing off Job Opportunities or Bigots or Catholics wanting to Legislate your Bedroom. No it’s DEFINITELY Communist Immigrants causing this!
Yeah, young folks are moving away because they’ve been indoctrinated in liberal college institutions and lured by a gay communist urban agenda to destroy rural America and bring about the decline of Christian conservative values! Nothing at all to do with capital consolidation and market monopolization resulting in reductions of diversified local markets and diminished job prospects! Increased cultural exposure due to accessing instantaneous global communications and social media? No way that has any influence in the decisions people make about what cultural environment they’d prefer to raise their children in. SmallTown USA is the best place to escape all the scary ideas that exist in the world, like equality among gender and race, and socializing the excesses of the private. Who would want to live in that kind of world?!
IMO, part of it has to do with Trumper school boards, weird conservative county commissioners voting to succeed and school library book bans. I live ‘out here’ and it gets worse every year.
I wonder if climate change will drive people back to places like Pennsylvanian? Good water, forested, temperate.
It’s 100° in june.
Those rural people should start throwing cornstarch paint on stuff to raise awareness of this important issue
