Why not look to small towns around state universities? Also, in the USA, look for micropolitan towns. Places that aren't tiny, but aren't major metro areas along with those kinds of challenges. Smaller towns can be easier places to afford homes, shorter distances to truly rural places. The people can be - not always though - challenging. May be more conservative politically and culturally. May be resistant to progressive ideas and efforts. Wife and I live in a smaller university town and love it here. It is a small community of similarly minded people who like the town and like technology and/or share similar progressive ideas. Fortunately we can hop in a car and be in a big city in an hour or so and enjoy big city entertainment and shopping. That said, our town punches well above its weight with plenty of shopping and entertainment opportunities.

Seconded - I live in a university town in the Midwest (usa). Several big tech companies have offices in town. The university itself employs a lot of tech folks, and spawns startups. There are also a few smaller/medium tech firms that are local. On a normal day, you're never more than 15 minutes drive from farm fields, and quite a few tech workers live out in the country and drive into town occasionally or daily for work.

It's nice, there's enough tech folks to maintain several maker spaces and co-working spots, and the students are a steady stream of enthusiastic youngsters to keep things feeling fresh. Added benefit that I've discovered talking to people in bigger cities: there's enough going on here that I often want to do several things in a day, and since much of it happens in the same 2 mile radius, you don't have to factor travel time into planning. (For example, I can go to a python meetup that ends at 7 and get to the theatre to see a 715 show with friends on the other side of town - a lot of places make that into an either-or proposition).

I grew up in a college town (3 small colleges, in an area with 40k people) and now live in a university town (30k people, state university).

You get the benefits of rural life, but your neighbors are more likely to be open minded and progressive, and you tend to get more culture, better schools and the restaurants are generally better.

Yeah, here in Southern NH near Portsmouth/ UNH there’s a strong tech scene but you’re also close to fairly rural areas.

Hi, what sorts of companies are in that area please?

What sorts? How do you mean?

I should have asked a slightly different question - I was just looking for any information you could share around what the tech scene is like there, i.e. what kinds of things are people working on, what specific companies, anything that be worth checking out if you're new there, etc.

Man, I am not sure how to answer that. It's close enough to Boston that pretty much any type of tech you're interested probably has a presence within an hour's drive. My email is just my handle at gmail so feel free to ping me to see if/ how I could answer better.

Any examples of micropolitan towns?

Decorah or Grinnell Iowa, or Northfield Minnesota.

Go Northfield!!! A wonderful little town with great school(s)!

Decorah and Grinnell are college towns, idk about Northfield.

College town - St Olaf and Carleton. Nice place.

I grew up in an area like this and it was pretty great!

You might be interested in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Digikey is based there and one of the largest electronic retailers in the world, but the town itself is relatively small (few thousand people)

Afaik they're the only company to work for so it's a bit limited. But I have a friend who lives there and is one of their many developers and she loves it. I understood from her that they're staying permanently remote even after the pandemic, but they might give you preferential treatment if you're willing to move anyways. And I know she still has the possibility of going into the office whenever she wants and has great relationships with her coworkers.

Some of their problems are very interesting too, as much of the software is to run their highly optimized warehouse. Their whole schtick is that they can get your product out of the warehouse in just an hour or two, so if you can pay for fast shipping it will get to you however fast you want. And this ends up being a very interesting optimization problem with human and machine components as well.

Company towns should probably not count.

In Michigan there are software companies in small rural towns but no where I know about is there a concentration.

I used to live in a small rural town West of Lansing when I worked as an agronomist in a past career. I left to do a SaaS startup and stayed local because this small town became a test site for cable Internet. Note this was a time when neither Lansing nor Grand Rapids had a broadband Internet option, everything was dial up or ISDN if you were lucky.

My new office was across from city hall. I advocated to the city father's that they spend a fraction of the money promoting it's empty industrial park (every small town in Michigan has one) to lure software companies to town promoting it's then rare broadband Internet. They treated me as if I was advocating building a spaceport for aliens. In fact if they saw me coming they'd cross the street.

I found out years later that quite by accident a startup had moved to the town specifically for the availability of broadband. Now they only have around 25 employees twenty years later but in a town of less than 3,000 I think that is still pretty good. But with a small amount of effort they could have had a dozen such companies ;<(.

Traverse City is becoming very techy. Over the course of the pandemic I have witnessed a lot of folks coming in from Chicago, etc, to work remotely, or to do tech work for one of the decent web/it/finance/insurance/medical companies here.

P.S. we are hiring web dev and analytics/data engineer if you know anyone in the area!

Maybe you could enlighten me on what you see as becoming very techy about Traverse City. When it comes to the companies that I've seen there you have:

- Small computer repair shops competing with big box computer repair

- Hagerty Insurance

- Munson Healthcare (the only health care provider in the 30 mile radius that I'm aware of).

- Finance - There are a couple of banks and credit unions but most of the investment firms I know of aren't based out of Traverse City.

- asure

- atlas space

- oneupweb

- midmark

- salamander

- efulfillment

- 20fathoms

- Healthbridge

to name a few off the top of my head

Traverse City is amazing, but you already know that ;<). However I have problems dealing with winter in East Lansing so I can only imagine how bad it would be up there. You better like snowmobiling or skiing. But for seven months out of the year it's absolute perfection.

You're not wrong about that. The winters can be pretty long. It's snowing as I type

I live in a rural community. It is a mile to my nearest neighbor. Many farmers live here, but also many people who just have long commutes to a town/city. I would not say that they are very different people - we all have more in common than we are different. But they do have different backgrounds and skills. Most of them are pretty sharp and are interested in technology, but they just don't know much about it. Some of them have tried to learn some basic coding. Many of them are intrigued by what tech can bring to agriculture. I think that if you wanted to take the lead and build a tech community locally, focused on helping people come up to speed and figuring how it would have direct benefit to the local community, most areas would be receptive to such a thing.

I live on rural property about an hour from SF. My neighbors aren't techies, but they really aren't that different. Lots of older/retired people, plenty of maker-type people. Out here there's space to have shops, tractors, and physically large projects. I can't discuss programming with my neighbors but welding, electronics, gardening, and construction are fun topics.

I still see many of my Bay Area friends; weekend parties at my place are way more fun than parties in their tiny city houses/apartments. And we still keep in touch remotely.

Not every rural area is the same; I also lived for a year in eastern Kentucky and the people are indeed a bit different there. But I still made friends, and I'm not a major extrovert or anything.

This is an area I'm looking to move to, from Santa Rosa up to Ukiah but way east Bay looks interesting.

What is the fire risk like? I'm comfortable with everything else via Starlink, remote job that'll stay remote, and similar.

> What is the fire risk like?

The answer is complicated.

My property has burned over twice since I've been here, and two years ago a few hundred of my neighbors lost homes in the LNU fire. However, I'll still say that for rural California, it's actually not bad.

It's grasses and oaks here ("light flashy fuels") which burn with low intensity. If you prepare diligently, your home will most likely be fine. We don't get crazy conifer-fueled earth-sterilizing crown fires like the Sierras. By end of spring you can barely tell there was a fire.

I joined the fire service after the LNU fires (unincorporated Solano is all volunteer). So while fire is something that's never far from my mind, it's not something I really worry about.

Sadly, Starlink isn't servicing this area yet, no DSL or cable either. I have to bounce "wireless broadband" off a couple hillsides. It's dreadfully slow, but way better than Hughesnet. Starlink will be a gamechanger for sure.

Great answer, thank you for following up. Makes sense about considering the fuels around you. I see cool places for sale in Sebastopol to Guerneville, but seems like fire traps potentially on those windy roads.

Starlink and a backup mofi sim router that is config'd a bit will suffice, I'm in a pretty rural spot but more mountain west. It's on the base tripod in my backyard (no roof mount) and works fine.

Wow! Which direction from SF??

Here's everywhere reachable within about an hour's drive from SF.

https://app.traveltime.com/search/0-lng=-122.41991&0-tt=60&0...

Interesting site. I can't vouch for its overall accuracy but I tried it on my home in NM, and it was interestingly incorrect.

probably north, marin county is beautiful.

Marin county is a poor choice if you want to build things. They are extremely uptight about permit enforcement. Sonoma is easier.

I'm in Solano, which is somewhat ok. We still sometimes struggle with the permit department. It would be even easier if we were about a mile north, in Yolo. But there isn't a huge inventory of properties for sale so you don't necessarily get to pick.

On the plus side, if you're trading in from a home in the inner bay area, everything will seem very cheap.

I'm looking to move somewhere exactly like this. Are you in the Santa Rosa area?

Just outside Winters, on the north edge of Solano county.

Winters is an underrated town, I think.

Some of the Seattle 'suburbs' get fairly rural, lots of trees, at least some lots are a couple acres, a few working farms, lots of hobby farms, but still have a lot of tech workers.

If remote work is important to you, check out internet options. There's a chance of Comcast and CenturyLink, but both get shifty about actually servicing homes in places (Comcast won't run a drop to my house even though their cable is on the pole at the corner of the lot; CenturyLink has run out of DSLAM ports in some neighborhoods, and some homes are too far from the DSLAM to get usable speeds); some public utility districts do fiber, but if your prospective house isn't already passed by their fiber, you would need to pay actual costs to extend the network plus actual costs to run a drop to your DMARC (which gets spendy if you've got underground wiring and a long driveway; I've got a $50k installation quote which 40% is undergrounding along my driveway and 60% is stringing the fiber on poles for 2ish miles); but some counties don't do that. I've seen relatively good reports for Starlink, but waiting time is unknowable and bandwidth and latency fluctuate during the day.

Very much agree with this, I know a number of people that commuted (pre-pandemic) to the East Side (Redmond/Bellevue) that live in North Bend, Monroe, Sultan, etc. These are all cities that are very much part of the 'Seattle area' and are not really considered rural, but would tick many of the boxes.

If you want to go farther out, there are plenty of parts of WA that are really rural - but you might not find things like high speed internet are very accessible.

The one thing you won't get moving into any of those places is lower housing costs, however. These are all priced with the fact that high-earners are living in these cities and commuting into Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond and getting paid those salaries.

I live in Rural WA, between Olympia and Aberdeen. I live right in town and there's no problem getting 100mbps Internet via Comcast. Centurylink is very nearly a scam. If you go 2-3 miles out of town, things get more difficult, depending on the direction you take. Several friends are on DSL or worse. Hughes-or-whatever-they-are-now is awful for anything except very light use. Starlink is an option. Rent is expensive like anywhere else, but still less than the Seattle metro area. But, this is becoming a closet community for Olympia and Lacey, driving up housing prices.

If there's a tech "scene" here, I'm unaware of it.

Yeah, the housing prices don't really lower until you're looking at a 90 minute commute. I feel like 'semi-rural' is an appropriate term for these places that aren't anywhere near as dense as suburbs, but also aren't mostly large lots of farm/forestry/wilderness/open space or even a patch of homes surrounded by that.

Houses in North Bend are well over a million dollars.

Starlink is pretty capable, been running it side-by-side in that sort of area vs. the local and only big name ISP. For a month+ of two remote tech workers doing video calls, hasn't been an issue.

We have similar issues with CL out here in rural NM. One interesting alternative are both commercial and cooperative microwave-based almost-mesh networks. We just signed up with one that ultimately ties back into CL somewhere, but is the only way the its 4000 members would get internet within a 400 square mile area.

Line of sight systems are pretty iffy out here, trees and hills mean you probably don't have LOS to anywhere (great for privacy, not great for wireless isps)

I'm on a train and just went through some charming town south of Centralia. Wonder if it would appeal to remote tech workers.

I think the people of Centralia have been displaced enough by spoiled tech workers.

I don't think I'm advocating that anyone be made to leave?

By affecting property values and land taxes, your advocations don’t need to be implicit to affect locals- think people with no money who have lived there for decades or more. People who are barely getting by as it is.

Do you really want another old couple on the streets of seattle so that you can live your agrarian fantasy?

In fairness I've no skin in the game, I'm not from here or moving here. Just seemed like a cute town near the train.

I'd hope new housing would be built to accomodate any newcomers.

Is there bad air quality there from the coal fire?

I think you're thinking of Centralia PA?

Fair, out of context it's unclear. I'm in Washington state.

Have you heard about CORI or the Rural Innovation Network communities?

The Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization partnering with rural leaders across the country to build digital economies that support scalable entrepreneurship and lead to more tech jobs in rural America.

https://ruralinnovation.us/community-impact/rural-innovation...

https://ruralinnovation.us/

Not affiliated, just found it prompted by your question, looks very interesting!

I lived in a Southwest Virginia college town for a few years after college.

* Fast and cheap fiber internet. Reasonably priced utilities.

* A reasonably sized and maintained home with a yard goes for under $200,000.

* Small airport with a connection to Charlotte on AA that I believe had federally subsidized aviation access.

* Small risk of natural disasters.

* I did a photography gallery and the mayor of that town stopped by to see it.

I enjoyed my time there but after friends slowly moved to bigger cities, I did too. I can't see myself happy there anymore. I probably wouldn't be married now and probably would have had a harder time forward in my career. Even if there was a tech scene there, it wouldn't be larger than 10 or so people, and the local tech companies were far less advanced.

But if I had a choice as a kid where would be more fun to grow up, I'd say back in Virginia. More room to roam, outdoor activities nearby without parking issues, yard for hosting get-togethers, and far less pressure in school/extra-circulars.

Hope this helps a little :)

Huntsville, AL, & Chattanooga, TN both have tech communities. Huntsville has NASA's MSFC and Redstone arsenal, so there's a ton of tech talent from all over the country there. Companies like Boeing, Blue Origin, Lockheed all have a presence. They're now starting to see non government / defense tech companies spring up, Like CommentSold. Gener8tor is launching a new accelerator program there.

Came here to say this. Neither are rural for sure, but you don't have to far outside the city to be rural. Limestone/Morgan county has fair number of tech people

If you really want to go rural, Scottsboro Electric offers gig internet, and you can join a snake-handling church too if that's your thing

Asheville NC seems to be turning into a "work remote" tech hub. I moved here during the pandemic and have met many tech workers just walking around my neighborhood. Technically it's a city (looks like ~90k population), but coming from NYC it certainly feels like nature to me. There are streams and mountains and back yards.

I feel like by the time you have a community that is worth noting that they're not very "rural" anymore. At the very least it is then suburban.

Number of tech worker's that's hard to know.

People's definition of "rural" varies widely.

Many "rural" people live in small towns/cities where their nearest neighbor is mere yards away, others would only consider "rural" to be where the nearest neighbor couldn't be hit with a high-powered rifle.

Yeah that's a challenge. Last article I read about people "fleeing" San Fransisco was very vague until they mentioned a family who moved to a "rural community".

Later they mentioned where they moved it was ... it was the suburbs. Very much not rural.

Where I live there's a farm down the road, that doesn't make it rural either.

Albuquerque, NM is kind of rural.

It's weird, since at 500,000 people we definitely meet the definition of a big city, but culturally people behave like it's a small town. Additionally, it's feasible to live in the mountains and still live less than an hour away, or to live in one of the nearby villages (Corrales, Placitas, Tijeras) and essentially enjoy the same lifestyle as someone living in rural New Mexico despite Albuquerque being very close by.

And yeah, we have ample numbers of people who work in tech, albeit most of them are connected to the federal government in some capacity, so it's not the "trendy" kind of tech. For that reason, and perhaps also because of the age and general conservative nature of people who work for the federal government, the tech community here might come across as having less energy than a place that's a fraction the size of Albuquerque. You're more likely to find a fellow programmer through a outdoor group than a tech meetup.

Do you know anything about Las Cruces? I know New Mexico State University is there so I was curious if there's any kind of tech community down there.

Not to gatekeep the word rural, but: Problem with some of these replies is they’re pointing out small cities, not rural areas. When I (and maybe OP) think “rural/pastoral” I am thinking villages with less than 500 people. A house on 2 or more acres where you can’t see your neighbor is considered a small property. That’s rural. Not Asheville or Fort Collins. Those are just small cities.

Every time threads like this come up it humbles me to realize how many people have never actually seen, much less lived in, a rural setting. Yes this is gatekeeping, but it serves a purpose to set a realistic perspective. See below for folks who think 'rural' means a suburb of a major city.

The difficulty for me is that I've been to very rural areas, I've stayed in rural areas and I've had friends/family in rural areas. And I do mean actually rural areas away from towns and cities.

I've never lived there though and it is hard to get a feel for what would actually bother you until you've spent a significant amount of time there.

I live in a blue collar neighborhood in Cincinnati where a lot of the people dream of one day living in a rural setting.

I hit on some of those where I live.

    2 or more acres: Yes
    can't see your neighbor: No
    Less than 500 people: No, just about double that at 1k

I consider where I live pretty rural. In my town there isn't a lot of "tech" people that I know of but 15 min away there is a small "city" with about 15k population that has an active co-working space that is all tech people (its like 20ish person group).

Even in the "city" that is 15 min away, there is never any real traffic, not like what you get in a major city. I never worry about hitting traffic, I can come and go to the co-working space at will without ever a thought of "I better leave before rush hour hits".

"Population thresholds used to differentiate rural and urban communities range from 2,500 up to 50,000, depending on the definition." [1] That page goes on to describe a bunch more details, but the fuzzy idea of what people mean is somewhere with population density below roughly 500 people/square mile and not in commuting distance to an urban center.

[1]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur...

I'm curious why HN is continually so confused by the word "rural", certain subjects almost always fall apart on this website because of folks confusion over the word.

I'm thinking that its because many HN users live in or close to medium to large sized cities. So they have no perspective when it comes to a place that's truly rural. They just see that some small city has no high rises or large companies and just assume "that must be a rural town."

Its because most here have never really been rural. Rural is a place to drive past or fly over on to something interesting.

It's confusing because the Census Bureau's definition quite doesn't capture the essence or totality of what makes an area "rural". It only operates on numbers and self-reported designations, neither of which encapsulate what OP would expect.

I'd agree with this, and through it would suggest having a tech community, or indeed any interest based community would be unlikely with that few people.

To give you a perspective on Britain since most replies are US centric, I now live close to Shrewsbury near Llangollen on the Welsh border. I've a castle at the end of my road and regularly see (& smell!) cows, horses and sheep from my kitchen window who graze on a paddock where just a few weeks ago I noticed a hot air balloon take off.

My barn has wooden beams, four toilets yet cost less than half to buy than the middle terrace apartment in London that came with 1 toilet and only 1 bedroom and a corridor kitchen. It is also ~4x in area. It came with an allotment and 5 generous plots where I like to plant leeks, onions and runnerbeans where I batch freeze them rather than get them wrapped in plastic shipped from Argentina. I have breathtaking scenery, fresh air and countryside walks nearby along with many ofsted outstanding schools.

It is quite tricky to live far from amenities in the UK so expect markets and farm shops aplenty, I can get unpasteurised milk fresh from pasture grazed cow to bottle the same day which I could not in the city. Our island, being smaller than a state it is easy to get anywhere, festivals are aplenty, fishing in Aberystwyth, a blustery night in Edinburgh for instance and a car or short journey to the station can have you on the continent and in Ghent or Bruge, Antwerp, Berlin or Stockholm the same day.

People are generally rational, courteous and kind mannered. I am greeted as I walk past, unlike in parts of London or Birmingham. I do not lock my doors, and my daughter is learning about life in a safe and idyllic environment I can provide and ok ok it is true my neighbours are mostly old dears, it only means I am less likely to disturb them. I don't hear police sirens and ambulances every day and I don't have to stand armpits in my face travelling the tube yet I can still get to a major airport faster than I when I was in east London for a time.

Unless for the nightlife it beats me why anyone capable would want to be near the cities esp. now with remote work becoming the regular experience of many. If you choose the UK and would like to know more feel free to username -åt- gmail me.

Also if you're lucky, bilingual schooling too <3 Wales :D

I don't know if it qualifies for your standard but Greenville, SC and its surrounding areas (Traveler's Rest, Simpsonville, Easley, Greer) have a blossoming tech community over the last 10 years. I'm one of the admins for our main tech Slack group and there's about 1,400 of us in there at last count.

Beautiful downtown area around a waterfall, tons of biking, near mountains and 3 lakes.

House prices are through the roof right now due to the influx of people though. Stories of bidding wars that used to be unheard of in this area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZA252lotHM

After going fully remote my fiancée and I recently moved back. The changes in Greenville over the past several years are staggering. Tons of growth!

I’d like to get plugged back into the tech community here. Could I grab an invite to the slack group? hahn.shot.first@gmail.com

Sent.

There is "Programmers village" ("Поселок программистов") in Kirov Oblast in deep Russia.

It is not exactly a rural community: it's just 20 or so families of remote tech workers (mostly freelancers) living a few kilometers from a small old town with dirt cheap land and local labor (like "buy a two-story house with one month's SF salary" kind of cheap). It was founded before the pandemic by a guy who used to work as an SWE at Yandex and grew tired of living in Moscow.

I wonder if something like this exists elsewhere.

I'd like to know, too.

My guess: You need at least a town with a state college. (Do you consider Fort Collins, Colorado to be "rural"? It's about 110,000 people. Decent tech scene there.)

This is basically Champaign-Urbana, Illinois too. You have the university, Wolfram Research, Volition, tech startups, etc. downtown. You drive two miles south and it's just corn galore.

I’d say the rural places are the places where things like Fort Collins are the nearest big city.

I’m working on founding a nonprofit with the explicit aim being to foster exactly that, with coworking spaces being the central hub to collect and train techies (and other remote workers).

Here’s an excerpt from a draft of our organizational plan:

> When Americans raised in a rural area want to enter knowledge work or start a business, they’re usually stuck with two options: do something local, which caps their earning potential, or move to an urban metropolitan area, which exacerbates the problem of rural brain drain. [REDACTED] fosters and accelerates a recent third option: work remotely or start an internet-based business, opening up the earning potential formerly only available to those who chose to move to the big city, while keeping the people rooted in (and thus their earnings circulating through the economies of) their rural home.

> While the first thought to unlock aforementioned internet-based earning potential for rural Americans might be universal broadband on the scale of the rural electrification of America in the mid 1900s, there are two specific advantages that focusing on coworking as a complimentary solution provides. First, coworking spaces can be built as a centralized service for all citizens of a county, like a university exchange or a courthouse, when broadband internet service is available in part of a rural county but not to most of the citizens at home. Second, coworking spaces continue to provide value and foster economic potential even once every rural home has broadband internet, as evidenced by their success and popularity in cities across the world.

Hey we should talk! The county I live in has pretty good fiber with a population under 20k. I’ve been tossing around the idea of creating a curated list of properties for sale here. There isn’t a tech community here yet but the property prices are cheap ($325k for a house and 40 acres, also has city water).

What made you interested in rural communities? What would make you likely to move to one? It’s quite a different way of life out here but I have no doubts that one could adjust.

Curious, which county do you live in?

Scott county VA: https://datausa.io/profile/geo/scott-county-va

Property mentioned: https://apps.realtor.com/mUAZ/edgtb14h

> I would like to live a more pastoral life, but anecdotally I've heard that people tend to be very different to those you find in a city.

You don't even have to get that far out of the city to get away from city people. I'm just an hour from DC, in a part of Maryland where there are still quite a few farms within a 5 minute drive, and it's like night and day compared to the city. And I even have fiber internet! Strongly recommend it.

Uk Oxford and Cambridge are bona fide tech hubs, and towns of ~150k people but in either you can totally live in a village with a 20-30 min bike commute.

We’re talking cows in pastures and dark skies. Hell, I know someone who helped raised some cattle on a common in return for a share of the meat... while actually within Oxford City boundaries.

We’re in Charlbury, 15 minutes out from Oxford by train, and it’s full of knowledge workers (tech included). FTTP broadband, plenty of facilities, population just 3000, beautiful Cotswold countryside. The only downside is that house prices are high as a result.

> We’re talking cows in pastures and dark skies.

Can you actually see the Milky Way anywhere in Oxford? I was never able to when I lived there.

A friend lived in a “dark sky” village near Oxford, no street lights etc. Not sure just how dark it got.

Would there be a backlash from the local community? I think unless the said tech community makes a positive impact to the native society live there, the reception is not going to be welcoming, I think.

Majority of the places I have seen tech people move to, the first thing to happen is increase in prices, be it housing or services.

I do worry about this. It feel like I often hear complaints of an influx of tech workers leading to higher prices for locals, especially real estate. I have friends in Denver, CO and Bend, OR specifically who have made that complaint over the last couple years

Denver and Bend are not rural.

If you’re really in the rural you’d be a significant percentage of the population just by moving in.

I’m talking more about influx of tech workers in those places rather than how rural they are. I’m aware they’re both cities and not that I’m seeking

Depends what you mean by rural. If you literally want to walk to the local horse riding club from your front door, my old town was Cottenham UK, a 20 minute commute from Cambridge science park: https://goo.gl/maps/yeRNL3Dayu5eXYkx6

Also I grew up in Havant, and basically all of the A27 is a thin strip of urban surrounded by fields — my childhood home was almost equidistant between Lockheed Martin and a horse farm/castle.

Outside of the U.K., a friend lives on the edge of Zürich[0], has fields with grazing sheep an arrow’s flight[1] from their flat.

[0] technically not in the city itself, but in a conurbation and you wouldn’t notice the boundary by looking at an aerial photo.

[1] a bit longer than a stone’s throw; specifically 100 meters.

A possible target would be paper mill towns or similar. They tend to be rural to be close to the wood supply, but having a staff of engineers means there is a chance for a tech component to the population. I grow up in a small town in Maine, 1500 people in 45 square miles. The next town over from the mill town. Our regional HS had a strong science/math component again connected to the engineering population I think. Interestingly, cable was so late in getting to my town that when it arrived it was cheaper to run fiber than copper, so my parent's have fiber to the house, excellent internet speeds. I have been able to work very functionally in my software engineering job from there.

The name is escaping me right now, but I believe there are startups in AZ that are building "artificial communes" - ie a rural kind of community, no cars, everything within walking distance, inhabitants are tech people working remotely. I think their business model is eventually going to be charging some kind of tax on everything that occurs within the community.

I'd try to Google something reminiscent of "AZ artificial community" - I tried Googling that, but couldn't find it. Kind of frustrated that I can't remember the name now!

That sounds pretty dope to me. I'd love to have a planned community that are car-free or car-lite (this was by far my favorite aspect of living in Munich).

Culdesac? https://culdesac.com

Well, I moved to a village of about 250 people in rural Ireland, and I've met some other rural Irish tech workers online, but don't know of any concentrations of tech workers, we're all far apart. I do wonder if this will change over time as housing in cities gets less and less affordable.

It's.... Fine. The locals are mostly bemused. I'd struggle to do it in rural US where the political divide is much wider. I'm only here because it's cheap though.

How is the broadband? I'm in Dublin and often contemplate moving out but I run into connectivity issues in many of my favoured locations.

Fastest I've ever had, gigabit fibre.

Not to plug but I built www.gaffologist.com to find my house. You can choose rural fibre routes as an overlay

That's worth plugging. Thanks.

Silicon Fen in UK? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Fen

Pre-pandemic, Bend, Oregon where I live was already a hot spot for remote work:

https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/bend-is-u-s-capital-of...

It's a city of 100K people though, so I don't think it's what I would call 'rural' if you live in town.

Isn't this an oxymoron? i.e. the second enough techies converge in the same location is the same second it transforms from a rural community into a suburb

Absolutely not. You’ll find plenty of communities in rural areas: churches, American Legion, quilting groups, hunting buddies, continuing education classes at the county extension, etc.

Thanks for posting this. I grew up in a rural area / small town. I've been trying to get back to that life (main drivers: I have young kids and like the outdoors more than office buildings). Happy to discuss this concept or try to help anyone interested. I've been discussing with a couple groups but they are in EU. Building this in the US would be a lot more straightforward.

The Raleigh NC area has quite a bit of tech, and if you stay about 20-25 minutes outside of downtown you can get that rural lifestyle while still being close to the city and tech companies. Specifically if you stay south of the city. I have 2 acres and regularly see cows across the field in my backyard but I also have a good selection of local tech conferences and reliable fiber internet.

Agree Raleigh and the general Triangle area is a good one. Maybe surprising for most here but Maryland and Virginia is like this as well. We're more expensive but you can get 1-3 acres within an hour commute of DC and/or Baltimore with a relatively robust tech scene, especially if you're willing to work for the government. Areas like Frederick, MD even have reasonable rail commutes into DC!

Two places I have lived that you might want to consider: Oak Ridge, TN and Blacksburg VA. Both are small towns with full-fledged rural areas a short drive away, but both also have tech anchors. For Oak Ridge, it is ORNL and for Blacksburg it is Virginia Tech. There is also Inland Motor corporation in nearby Radford, and maybe a few others (it has been decades since I lived there).

Co-founder of Hax0rbana here. I now live in a metro area of about 120K. Prior to that, I lived in the DC area and LA before that. I mention this for 2 reasons: 1. I don't know if you consider my situstion to be rural. The town is surrounded by cornfields, but I'll leave that to you to decide. 2. It's clear some people answering are clearly city folks. That's fine, but they only know the stereotypes about rural folks being uneducated, straight, poor, etc.

Urbana, IL has a University of Illinois campus. In other words, it's a college town. To give you an idea of the culture, churches have pride flags painted on their signs and hang black lives matter banners. The main event at annual engineering open house is robo brawl, a scaled down version of battle bots. We have art scattered around town, made by local artists. The Independent Media Center has things ranging from a Makerspace, to a bicycle repair community, to books to prisoners. If you show up wanting to learn something, people will be happy to share what they know.

For amemities, we have gigabit fiber run by a regional company. If you want Comcast, they're here to. We have one of the best public transit systems in the country.

This doesn't describe all rural areas/smaller towns.

When we were selecting a city to start our hacker co-housing project, we factored in many things: cost of living, having smart people around, weather, taxes, civil rights, and of course the town's culture (with bigotry being the primary concern).

I think the main takeaway is to choose the location carefully. Not all rural areas are alike, just like not all big cities are alike. Think about the things that matter to you, and measure potential destinations based on those criteria. If it's critical that you have a goth club or something like that, you'll probably end up in a bigger city.

They're trying to build one in Water Valley, Mississippi: https://everesthub.org/. No publicly available fiber internet yet.

Water Valley (population ~4k) is often described as an artists community. It's near Oxford, MS, which is also known for its literature and art.

This thread has mostly focused on the US. In the UK, rural life is quite different and it frustrates me no end that there is no equivalent to the local pub even in small towns in the US (sports bars don’t count)…

In terms of specifics in the UK, look west and southwest. Full of fantastic little villages which have communities.

I work as a software engineer for Veterans United Home Loans, their headquarters is in Columbia, Missouri. One of my coworkers lives 20 minutes from work and has a stable and owns horses. It was rated one of the best places to work for this year by Fortune Magazine and honestly as a developer I feel pretty spoiled. I’ll be straight, salaries aren’t going to match what you’ll get working remotely for a job on the coast, but it’s more than enough to live the pastoral lifestyle you seem to be looking for.

Also it’s a college town so there’s night life and fun to be had, they’re inclusive and while they don’t have things like IKEA Kansas City and St. Louis are two hours away if you really want to scratch that bourgeoisie itch.

I work for them but don’t represent them, but saw your post and thought I’d make you aware of our growing team! I think there’s a few hundred engineers right now.

I live in a town of 35,000 people, where the economies of several counties in each direction are based in agriculture. There are tech people here - and I expected there would be a lot more by now - but it is very slow growth. Internet service isn't bad, there is a small co-working space or two, but the bigger issue is one of demographics. We have a lot of retirees coming for sunshine and a perceived more affordable lifestyle, but younger people are slow to want to bring their families here even if they could be remote workers. There are a couple small tech firms (like under 10 employees), but none of the biggest issues is that there are really only two smallish employers who can offer any kind of competitive compensation. That risk - that you are reliant on remote work - keeps a lot of people from being willing to move here.

UK? Pick any county within an hour or so of London. Oxfordshire and Berkshire is full of systems/tech people.

There's a small village (250 people) in rural New Mexico that until recently was home to both the 2nd programmer at Amazon and the main inventor of the Kindle. That was close to 1% of residents, but the kindle guy left :)

More seriously, I'd say that I love doing "tech work" out here. Almost none of my neighbors know anything about what I do, and most of them don't want to know. Suits me fine. I'd rather talk about tech stuff online with people who know, and about everything else with my neighbors.

I also like that my village is more of an artist community (famous, and not so famous) more than a tech community. Generally more interesting people for own personal tastes. Also, living around the corner from my cookbook idol (to the extent that I have cookbook idols) is both interesting and intimidating.

What part of New Mexico?

Sante Fe County, south of Santa Fe.

How do you like it out there? Is there any kind of tech scene in the area or in New Mexico more generally?

I've only been here 3 years, most of which has been a COVID pandemic. I also don't tend to ever seek out tech scenes anywhere, so I'm probably not the right person to ask. As a self-employed aging developer with my own FLOSS project that generates a good income, it's a fine place to live. If I was a younger developer eager to learn and expand, much harder to say if it would be a good choice (it might be, but it might not).

Short answer: depending on your definition of rural, yes, there are def pockets of tech folks in rural areas.

These rural areas with tech folks tend to be outer suburbs of cities and/or niche touristy/outdoor places -- basically work-remote tech folks who live at an area to enjoy the other aspects the land can offer.

I run a remote-first business around Lake Tahoe in Nevada and there's def large pockets of CA tech expatriates here settling down here, but this area isn't exactly rural, it's a big tourist town. As you go east you end up in the desert and it gets pretty rural, and there's def a tech segment out there though it's highly correlated with a communal/art scene courtesy of Burning Man (art hippies that happen to tech).

I like "art hippies who happen to tech." In a similar area if you swap out the desert. Agree with pockets.

After reading the comments about rural vs suburb you'll probably find it in a suburb/smaller cities.

https://www.ruralsourcing.com/development-centers/

I've had a few friends work there, and interviewed as few times. It's pretty meh.

One time they gave me an offer for exactly what I told them I was already making. I would not go there unless I had to.

+1 for Chattanooga, TN. Municipal fiber, white water rafting, Rock City; what more could you want?

I had great fun and intense tech time working for astronomers.

Ideally, the telescopes are located in remote areas. This led to the engineers and programmers out there, too, or perhaps the nearest college town.

https://NRAO.edu

I find it interesting that I see a billboard in Carrington, ND for 10Gbps fiber. It is interesting to see if any rural towns would be attractive since some have some amazing internet speeds. Rural electrics like their fiber.

[edit] https://www.dakotacentral.com/services/internet/

BEK is the rural electric I was thinking of https://www.bek.coop/residential/lightband-internet

Fiber is easy to run in rural areas. In most cases you're negotiating with maybe a tenth as many property owners as if you were running it in the city. And that makes the cost lower and the bureaucratic process smoother.

If you're into medtech or healthcare, Rochester, MN. Rochester itself is around 80-100K, but in the middle of rural SE MN with several smaller communities around it.

There are a lot of tech folks in western Mass and western Connecticut, both very rural. I've met a few. Grey beards working remotely for a decade or two. And I've even met a few young people with kids who work remotely for NYC companies out of rural NJ.

Lancaster PA has or had a few tech companies.

So I'd say probably yes. Pick a county of 500 thousand people or so and start looking through their Craigslist for job postings. You'll find them eventually.

In my village in England, where I grew up, the house and land prices have increased 10-fold in twenty years, but the average salaries have only increased 2-fold. This makes it basically impossible for me to simultaneously make a living and live there. It makes me sad because I would like to live near my parents, other family and the place I grew up, but am essentially priced out by speculation and city folk from the south.

College towns.

Where I live (Charlottesville VA) has one of the best data science communities compared to other meetups in other major metros. It’s actually easier because things are closer and less spread out, so it’s easier to stay involved. There’s university connections. Also people move here because they historically have been good enough to not need to live in a giant city to have reliable employment.

I live in Breckenridge, CO. I'd love to make this more of a rural tech community. The harsh winters here make for great skiing and programming weather.

I'd love to live in Breckenridge. (One of my favorite things is feeding the trout in the dredge pond.) But... there's no way I could afford to live there :-<

There are many smaller / less bougie mountain or valley towns in CO. I've got a couple friends who live in Alamosa and work remote. Their cost of living is cheap and they're surrounded by mountains in all directions.

I'm in DGO. It's a great place to do all the outdoor play.

I like that there are better paying jobs able to be out here on the edge of the desert, but it's really hard to live in places where short-term rentals are combining with folks like me moving into the community. I will never be able to afford a place in town for sure.

I don’t know any off the top of my head but I am also very interested if there are any existing hubs. I assume it would be somewhere with good internet.

I don’t know of any for sure either, but I’d look around in the area around Chattanooga, Tennessee and similar places with affordable fiber.

Agreed. Sylacauga, AL has metro fiber/provided by electrical company. The three counties around Carrollton, GA (Haralson, Carroll, and Heard) are getting it from now through the next 6 years from Carroll EMC. Phase 1 has started and is focused on Haralson and Heard counties first. With a few in more rural areas of Carroll. Start here https://carrollemc.com/broadband Carrollton, GA also has UWG...the cheapest "state" school for tuition in Georgia.

I'm in a fairly rural area in Alaska. I work remotely and I'm unaware of any other tech workers around here. Which suits me just fine :)

Alaska Developers Alliance – https://www.akdevalliance.com/

Thanks for this link. I live on the Kenai Peninsula :)

Amateur Radio Clubs are pretty common in rural areas. That was my introduction to tech in a fairly small town (5k people).

Yes, they do tend to be very different, because their needs and lifestyles are different. If that's a problem, perhaps that's not a good environment for you. You're not going to find a rural, small community where nobody is a farmer, these communities exist on interpersonal, familial relationships with one another.

In truly rural areas there’s not a lot of people period. Small towns are better but you’re still dealing with a small number. Better to find a beautiful place and then find your community online.

I grew up in a small town. People are people, good, bad, boring, strange, theres just fewer to chose from.

I grow up in a small town in a developing nations, and 3-4 of my friends from there work in tech, some remote from there, some elsewhere, some are webmasters.

There isn't many before or after us sadly, which is why I am thinking of helping somehow to change that.

I'm from the sticks in brazil. Know not a single tech worker besides myself. The main benefit is everything is really cheap, you can live quite nicely with like $400/month. Would not come here without knowing the language though.

For the US, I’d look at the Center for Rural Innovation. The have been finding various tech scenes around the country. https://ruralinnovation.us/

Snide answer - look at voting records from the places you are interested in, and find those that match you as closely as possible so you don't have to be confronted by anyone different from you.

Every community is different. Having lived in both communities that could be classified as rural and metro, I will say that they can be different and the same at the same time.

Talk with my friends at Codefi in Called Girardeau, Missouri: https://www.codefiworks.com/

Innopolis, Russia, is such a community. It's a small city built around a university and tech complex. The population is around 3,000 or something and the nature is exquisite.

Can you describe a bit more about what you mean by living a pastoral life? do you mean to grow your own food, run a farm etc. or continue your tech career but from rural area?

I'd like to continue my tech career from a rural area with 4+ acres to grow produce for my family and enjoy quiet and privacy

Another thing you can search for is towns with regional airports. They tend to have a good blend of attributes for not too city, not too rural.

Go to Palmerston North New Zealand. You'll be able to live 15 mins out of town and live on a farm. There are loads of tech jobs there.

Getting a bit pricey now but lots of tech workers in the small towns 1-2 hours from Austin . Like Bastrop , liberty hill , Lockhart , etc

I started my career as a programmer out in Fredericksburg.

I think that it was good to be able to be able to get into Austin/ SA for meetings and then live in the sticks. I'm in Western CO now... there are a lot of tech workers in the small town where I live.

I’ve always kind of dreamed of starting something like this. A technocentric rural tech community

You might have luck in any one of a number of university towns.

This. Every one of the 50 states has a flagship university, and some of them are doing very good research in a variety of fields. You won't get rich there, but you can have a lot of fun and do cutting-edge work.

College towns usually have a lot more culture, in many senses of the word, than non-college towns of the same size. The highly educated workforce makes a big difference.

We used to live 30 minutes outside Eugene, Oregon (University of Oregon) on 50 acres. In retrospect, it would have been better to have a smaller place (3-5 acres?) closer to town. But we were definitely secluded.

Our local 4H program has a robotics team, for example. Right alongside the kids raising extremely fancy chickens (sometimes they're the same kids).

And yeah, colleagues of mine live on anything ranging from an old orchard to a working farm, in addition to those of us who live in town.

...also we're hiring two people if anyone is interested in global health data analysis or health informatics >.>

Yes, we are very different. I live just outside a small town (800people). We are definitely not a "tech" community, but we have a fiber network thats getting upgraded to 10Gbps sometime this summer.

I'm about 3mi outside of town on 5 acres of trees, and I care barely see my neighbor. Its pretty quiet except for the occasional truck driving up the hill. Oh, and the neighbors (or me) occasionally shooting at something.

I highly recommend it, if you can deal with the lack of people and the generally conservative lifestyles/beliefs. If you're a libertarian, just leave me alone, type, it works just fine.

Well, I can't count myself as a community since here I'm almost alone in IT physical community terms, but I'm an ex-urban (from a big city) person who decide to go rural, not much rural, in the sense that I'm still "near enough" to have a certain level of services, good enough connections etc, but still rural in a low-density area (French Alps, ~60Km from Sophia-Antipolis though)...

I do not really live a pastoral life, behind very small scale personal vegetable garden behind the house, but around here there are few agricultural enterprises with some carrots, potatoes, chickpeas, lentils cultivation and (small) herds of cows, sheep, goats, with limited milk, meat and cured meats products. It's still far more a tourist place with a big golf (the highest in the region), crag, canyoning, paragliding, a small aeroclub with gliders and small STOLs etc.

Respect of the big city, downsides:

- less services, even if there are enough they are not as near and 24/7/365 available, it's not an issue in ordinary life but might be in some cases, like something broke and you need a replacement Saturday afternoon and Christmas Eve or you need to go to the nearby hospital, urgent but not as urgent to justify a chopper transfer, or just an unexpected desire to go to a Chinese restaurant/pizzeria/* and there are almost none nearby;

- little variety of neighbors witch means a still "intensive" social life, since people are far more social than the city, with continuous invitations for lunch, dinner, ... but near-zero "cultural social life" in the sense of meet up with people of similar cultural/technical interests, you can just go to the nearest city/agglomeration for that;

- some services (electricity and connectivity) are aerial so outages are a bit more frequent than the substantially zero I've experienced in cities. That's not a real issue if you are equipped (I have a small p.v. with lithium storage and my connection have a good enough 4G/dummy 5G (700MHz) backups, no data/speed/* caps), they are actually burying many lines but so far I've experienced around two/three time/year 1-10' power outage casually one of few hours, half-a-day casual connectivity outage the new buried FTTH should solve that before next winter.

pro:

- far more relaxed life, commuting when needed is of longer range, but faster, without queues, accidents, parking issues, on still good and well entertained roads (winter included);

- vast selection of activities in nature, if you like them like me: going climbing means just going nearby, hiking? Potentially there is even no need for a car!

- available services are less, but of better quality, like when you go to the Drive supermarket you are the first or at maximum the second served, you can even phone "hey, I see an impromptu offering of climbing strawberry plants, can you put 4 aside? I'll be there tomorrow!" etc

- more freedom of movement by any means, even if for many activities you are tied to a car and it's not "rural" enough to own a cheap old STOL or mosquito chopper to goes around (well, at least for 99% of the residents, very few have small choppers to connect them with the shore).

I've lived in these areas across the US and at different stages of my life, so I can speak to it a bit. I also did it before and after making tech money, and have lived in a tech city while in tech too. There is definitely a scale. Below is describing what its like to live in/around the range of 2k-30k population towns and cities, where 10 mins out of town it gets and stays rural.

- People in tech do it, but I think it is still early. I'm discounting cities like Salt Lake, Nashville, Boise, and even Bozeman - new tech cities that used to be decently rural all things considered, and now are not. There seems to be a low amount of SV/NYC-style techies who are actually living out and around here, even though I think there is a lot of romance around the idea - working for Google and living in Lake Tahoe. Not a lot of people are actually doing it full time vs. 3 months during COVID who aren't Pete Thiel rich. As weak evidence, I knew someone personally who got a job at a good tech company in one of the rural states that people romanticize, and they were the first employee at that company in that state.

- I think what is more common is solid local tech scenes with local tech companies, many of whom "who recruit from people willing to move there" (quote from an engineer at a place like this). For every SoFi (I believe it has a large Montana presence or am I making that up), there are more local C++ agtech shops. There are a great meetups around farming hubs because of John Deere software and what it takes to hack or maintain it. Cool companies, stable income, simple life. I think there is also a growing mass of remote workers sitting in the 90-120 min belt from every tech city now, especially the smaller ones - Denver, Chattanooga.... Far enough way where you're in your own rural world, close enough to a job market to get an emergency in-person job if needed.

- It is definitely perfectly doable. Don't worry, the guy in the pickup truck likely isn't an a-hole. The politics are much more live and let live and revolve around hyper-local environmental, housing, taxing policy decisions. It is also almost a no-brainer financially if you are in the 3+ YoE range in your career, in a job that is safe remote, and past partying years. Do you want to go on your 5th year of bar crawling through NYC while your new "hey I'm finally making it" salary is getting eaten away by everything to do in your neighborhood that you've already done? Or decamp to upstate NY, and that $200k/yr base will set you for life within 5 years of saving. Why is this even more possible? Starlink. It works, it'll likely keep working, and it is going to change things.

- Decamping rural will start catching on I think, and it may profoundly change the Rust Belt, rural West, everywhere similar. The asymmetry of the opportunity vs. risk is just too much. Financially, it opens up near FI/RE outcomes without much effort. Move out, save up, move back to SF to do a cash purchase plus savings. For normies, it opens a peaceful stable life with a spouse and little league and $300k homes, while a tech salary flows into your local credit union and your kids' future crushing college debt is no more - now you're in the generational wealth category depending on your job. Right now it is more the contrarians doing it, but I think that will change, and these towns will go through some growing pains because of the income asymmetries hitting non-vacation towns. I don't think state governments are ready for it especially culturally (all that tech into Austin means tech donors in TX now), but also it'll help save their finances. If you look through rural appalachia, 1GB fiber is everywhere, there are mountains, there are funky college towns, and there are cheap homes. The worse the grind, inflation, everything gets, the more insane it is to sit on >$120/yr with a remote job and not step out of the geographic race for a while while staying in the career race just fine. You can leave SF at 27, come back at 31 a notably well-off person, and keep working for SF companies.

To your question, life out here isn't too different. People are people. The main differences are as follows.

- You'll get out of your levels.fyi tech pay bubble very quickly when you get an idea of the local incomes. You are walking wealthy, up there with the surgeon in the hospital. Some concerns you have will be very different from the "locals," but also it's up to you to become "a local" because the ethics of doing it aside, these communities are too small to avoid it. There are lots of ways to approach this - in short be a good person, be conscious of the opportunities you have, be modest, and volunteer.

- Local governance/government is hugely relevant - there are tangible ways to get involved in your community with possibilities for outcome that are otherwise hypothetical to the SF resident trying to run for local city council with layers of special interests and government above them to wade through. Here, it's a small town govt, a county govt, local strong interests, and a federal agency outpost somewhere in the 100 mil vicinity. For someone looking for tangible results from their efforts, that's a cool opportunity. Similarly, a small business is both affordable,in a friendly regulatory environment, and therefore not insane to try to do like in NYC. Take 3 years of vesting and start a bakery on main street.

- The main and surprising difference is you might empathize more with the militias/anti-Fed/anti-Big Govt. State government is certainly more of a thing, and Federal government isn't really a thing (at least visibly and per the who is coming to help me in a "help me in 60 minutes or less" judgement of authority). The geographical features of life here force more self and local reliance. Cell phone service drops out 10 miles out of town and its another 30 miles to drive. A broken down car and no water is dangerous. The culture here has survived in an environment that requires solving their own issues due to the nearest hospital/garrison/police station/fire department/anything being 60 minute drive away. Neighbors, local orgs, local ranchers - these are the positions of authority and help but not because of outdated ways. Rural Red and Urban Blue are stuck on opposite sides of this barrier: "what government?" vs. "the government is here to help and lets fund it more," // "why in the hell do I need a gun" vs "the local PD is 90 mins away... I should buy a handgun in case, seems crazy not to?" are all equally true.

- If you work in tech but hate the impacts of retail adtech, this is the world for you. QR codes, Seamless, Instagram - it's just not out here in the same way it's jumped the digital barrier into everyday life in cities. That noise is way turned down, and it's the best part of things here.

- The presence and role of corporate america and globalism is profound and weird. There isn't a federal government office for 2 hours, but there is a Walmart usually. It'll employ, but also is a faceless node. If DuPont poisons water in WV, it can get away with it for years, and delay the resolution for years. Similarly, there are good odds an Amazon Warehouse shows up around here at some point, and when that happens, the pros/cons get hyper-local with huge impacts. Nothing is theoretical this local.

- Human connections matter much more than they do in the cities. The protocols, handshake deals, politeness, earnestness, lack of snark, trust-first - all still present. This is a wonderful aspect of life here, and I think some of the friction points from my last bullet stem from this: two worlds colliding. But beyond that, if you're wondering where normal life went, it went out here.

I've come away from this with a central belief that perspective is everything, and geography has a lot to do with it. The lives of Bob on E 91st in Manhattan and Steven in Bridger, MT are significantly different for good reason, and it is hard without living in both dynamics to understand just how different they are, and what it implies I certainly have more empathy. Similarly, people are people, and there's magic to going rural and tying into that community. Critically, we all have the same passports. This part of the country and it's views can't just get written off. Our flour, fuel and beef depend on it, for one.

> I've heard that people tend to be very different to those you find in a city

In a lot of cases this is true - and it's not just about tech. Rural communities are often more religious, more conservative, lower income, lower educated, and have a lot less access to opportunity. Cities also mean that there's often a critical mass for many interests and minority groups. Are you LGBT? Are you a religious or racial minority? Do you have hobbies that might be more unique? Cities have the critical mass for so many groups of people.

Before I go further, I want to take a moment to talk about three things: income, education, and opportunity. Someone lacking any or all of those doesn't make them a bad person. However, moving to an area without those things can have an impact on you. In the US, a lot of services are paid for by property taxes collected by the municipality and county. If you move to an area where people are struggling, there isn't the same kind of money for services - and even if your housing is cheaper, you'll be paying a lot more in taxes since you might be going from "above average" to "really rich". Education and opportunity can also be a problem. Do you end up in an area where many have resorted to meth or opioids? Do you end up in an area where chronic unemployment is an issue? Again, this isn't people being bad or anything like that, but it can cause fear and resentment.

There was an article (which I can't find right now) about the unionization drive at an Alabama Amazon fulfillment center. Amazon came into a town that basically hadn't had jobs and everyone was living pretty poorly. The article interviewed some people and the sentiment came across as people thinking that the place was dying and even if they wanted a union, they didn't want to risk going back to a place that was a disaster.

In rural communities with flood risks, FEMA has bought and demolished properties rather than pay to rebuild them. This ends up gutting the tax base and leaves the community as a shell of itself. If the main store in your town and 5-10% of the houses get bought and demolished, you still have the roads, police, etc. to pay for with a dwindling tax base - and less reason for you to be there.

https://mtgis-portal.geo.census.gov/arcgis/apps/MapSeries/in...

Check out the census map and select "Population Change" and then zoom in one level so it shows counties. Many rural areas have lost 10-30% of their population over a decade. It isn't fun to be a part of a dwindling tax base. A lot of expenses don't go down as that tax base goes down.

Along with this, I'd argue that there's a brain/income/opportunity-drain in a lot of rural communities. People who are richer, have more education, and more access to opportunity are more likely to leave. Are you buying into a location where the future isn't on your side?

If you're thinking about the next 20-40 years of your life, I'd argue you need to think about climate change and whether the US will continue to subsidize rural life. If we're going to get serious about climate change, will that mean $10 gas? Even with electric cars, the cost will increase. Will we continue to spend a fortune on roads and other accommodations for rural life? The US spends a huge amount of money on rural telecom infrastructure our of taxes on urban areas. Will places like Amazon start differentiating shipping pricing? It's a lot cheaper for them to deliver in cities where the distance between stops is small. I don't expect anything extreme, but if things are getting 1% worse every year, that starts to add up.

All that said, I do think that there are some good rural communities in New England - Central/Western Massachusetts and Vermont especially. You'll find high educational attainment, a population that is relatively stable, access to decent towns and cities, and a liberal enough attitude that won't expect you to conform to the hegemony as much as many rural places. Many of the Western Mass towns even have municipal fiber. I think you'd find enough tech workers around.

Honestly, it's hard to say whether a place would be a good fit for you since I know almost nothing about you. Are you white, male, straight, Christian, etc.? A lot of rural places can become easier if you tick those boxes. If you don't tick those boxes, then you might start wondering how you might be treated differently from living in the city.

It's also hard to know what you mean by "rural" since the distinction between suburban and rural is hard in the US. In Europe, things drop off to farmland very quickly. In the US, things just sprawl with no clear distinction. Is Saratoga Springs, NY rural? It's certainly a bit far from things and might be the "pastoral" feeling you're looking for, but it still has stuff around. Likewise, there are plenty of locations with very few people that might be an hour from a city like Boston. Boxborough, MA is an hour from Boston while covered in forest. I'd think of it as "suburban", but it might the rural/pastoral feel you're looking for while still being within commutable distance to everything.

Maybe you're looking for a place like Saratoga Springs or Ashville, NC or Burlington, VT or Charlottesville, VA. I think those places could be really nice. I would caution about moving to an area that is seeing a lot of population decline that has a big lack of opportunity.

>I'd argue you need to think about climate change and whether the US will continue to subsidize rural life.

Not to fault you, but you're a seriously urban-centric thinker. Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. Food, fiber, fuel, etc come from the rural reaches. Flip this on it's head and we see that rural communities are providing a huge subsidy to urban communities in the form of labor and commodities.

There is a gross misunderstanding between urban and rural citizens of the complexity of their interactions, and it's near the core of our current political polarization.

> Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. Food, fiber, fuel, etc come from the rural reaches.

We pay a premium to buy food from the rural US in the form of common import tariffs that stifle or eliminate competition at the expense of the consumer and to the benefit of agricultural interests, and of course, taxes that subsidize agriculture. Large volumes of food need to come from some rural area, but if left to its own devices, the market would never demand that so much of it come from the rural US, or that the rural US make so much from the crops it produces. That's presumably some of what the OP was hinting at.

One of the main points of the parent posts was the impact of climate change and/or subsidies for fuel. Our local agricultural system is already hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels, and you propose that this situation is improved if the US starts importing most of its food?

So the US would stop producing food and import it instead?

First, why? Second, from an ecological perspective this wouldn't change anything, just shift shit around.

Ridiculous, stop.

> So the US would stop producing food and import it instead?

Is that how US agricultural interests would react if they had to compete on the free market? They would simply give up and let the land lie fallow?

You just said government would lift tariffs. Most of the land would go to a monoculture for export. The only land that would grow diverse foods for domestic consumption would be to cater to the demand for local consumption. And in the world where government lifted tariffs, we must assume that they acted in representation of the people, so that demand mustn't be so high.

This is pretty basic.

The food you eat as a wealthy person is probably in a good part produced in other parts of the world due to cheap labor. Sure we provide lots of corn and and soy but a lot of that is for export fuel and meat production

"Large volumes of food need to come from some rural area, but if left to its own devices, the market would never demand that so much of it come from the rural US, or that the rural US make so much from the crops it produces."

Why not? The US exports a lot a food and consumes a lot of food (per capita). If we were to cease exports and even some domestic production, then prices will rise. The worldwide demand isn't going anywhere but up, while arable land is the same or shrinking.

In a way I do think that many farm subsidies should be examined and maybe done away with, but in another way I realize that we can't compete globally (exports), and many likely can't afford to pay the the true cost of domestic production. Not to mention if we become an importer because of this, we could outbid other nations and instigate famine in the poorer nations.

> Why not? The US exports a lot a food and consumes a lot of food (per capita). If we were to cease exports and even some domestic production

To clarify, removing tariffs and agricultural subsidies might not affect our overall agricultural output much (I wouldn't want to make a prediction on that) but it would lower the cost of goods which were previously subsidized with taxes or tariffs.

> Not to mention if we become an importer because of this, we could outbid other nations and instigate famine in the poorer nations.

It's worth pointing out that almost all economists of all political leanings are opposed to agricultural subsidies (it's one of the rare political things economists agree on) and one of the commonly cited reasons is that buying food produced by third-world economies at a true market price would be a natural and valuable step in helping those countries develop and grow out of poverty. The number of powerful people (including people who would normally give lip service to free markets) who, when confronted by this consensus among economists, basically don't give a shit is... disheartening.

I think that would be true and work, but only if our output wasn't reduced enough to interfere with other nations (supply needs to exceed nutritional need as it does today, and the distribution and supply chain also needs to be unaffected or improved). No idea of it would normally or not. But I'm guessing the high inflation and potential food crisis from the war in Ukraine would make this a unlikely candidate for a time to make that switch.

> The number of powerful people (including people who would normally give lip service to free markets) who, when confronted by this consensus among economists, basically don't give a shit is... disheartening.

Domain experts reach consensus and their recommendations aren’t followed in a lot of disciplines. I agree in this case it makes economic sense to stop farm subsidies — which could result in lower domestic food production and greater imports from abroad. And when the world economy is humming along smoothly that’s great. But if there’s a hiccup in the world economy —- e.g., in the case of war in a place where it makes economic sense to grow a lot of wheat or a problem in the logistics network shuttling things from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed then it’s not as clear-cut.

My naive view of politics, when they’re running well, is to navigate conflicting priorities from groups, including domain experts, the populace, etc.

And I think the farm subsidies could be interpreted to involve national security concerns on top of then economic concerns. If a world war breaks out and we’re on the opposite side from places we normally source our food then they have leverage over us.

TL/DR I think there’s more at play than just the economic concern.

Regarding the security concerns, I assume the reduction in poverty overseas would have tremendous security benefits here. I also tend not to believe US agriculture would not simply reduce its output to dangerously low levels, but that’s harder to speculate about.

Exactly.

It's bizarre how often you see people arguing as if a lack of rural or farm subsidies would suddenly mean food disappearing.

The core function of the government is to provide basic necessities to its constituents. In other words, guaranteeing a food supply is a critical national interest and there’s no better way than to incentivize home-grown food.

The primary function of government was to protect liberty. The USA liberty experiment is nearly done.

These two go hand-in-hand. As a whole-cloth believer in government's main goal being the protection of rights, I'd propose that it's pretty tough to guarantee those rights if you have invading armies or revolting citizens. Guaranteeing stability for the nation (in economic, military, and civic spaces) is needed, even if only as a means to protect liberty.

Consider this scenario:

1. The US drops all agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere.

3. "Elsewhere" goes to war with a US ally and stops selling food to the US.

4. The US then wishes it hadn't given up its abilty to grow food.

The amount of “the worlds economy is so interdependent that no country would go to war” argumentation seems to have died somehow.

Also I don’t know how “we will get food from even further away rural communities argues against food coming from rural communities”.

> 2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere

Gonna stop you there. This wouldn't happen, because the US has plenty of growing acreage and plenty of demand. The farming industry doesn't need subsidies, and removing them would affect total output only slightly on average.

Now, if we were more like Japan and had issues with enough space for farming, then yeah I'd agree with you.

Unless medium to large scale farming in the US is significantly different than the rest of the world, Land availability and demand are only tiny parts of the puzzle and not even the hardest issues to solve when farming. The need for immediate scale for any kind of shortage is guaranteed to cause significant shortages + massive price hikes starvation in the short term.

Lol, just how big do you think the farm subsidies are? This is some big-time Clancychat you're throwing out there.

Lol, i'm not talking about scale changes, not subsidies! loloolol

> 2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere.

I'd argue that the more plausible outcome is what economists predict: US agricultural interests would have to compete and domestic prices for food would go down, while the price that struggling economies which export food can charge for that food would go up. Competition... and the various parties involved focusing on what they're good at producing.

On the other hand, we in the US do tend to be pretty idiotic about largely abandoning business sectors when the going gets rough.

The prime growing areas will just move north where there is already plenty of rural land not being used.

Rural communities are providing a subsidy to urban communities by ... selling them things? Isn't "charging money for" just about the opposite of subsidizing?

Food is necessary; that does not mean that the US's rural communities in their current form are all necessary or even that they're unsubsidized. Food is an incredibly substitutable market, you'd expect the market to push prices down to a minimum.

In your worldview: the government subsidizes rural life by... building roads? Making gas cheaper?

How does all the food grown in rural areas make it into cities? Not by teleportation; by being loaded into semis, driven on roads, using gas. There's a cost. When roads get worse, when gas is more expensive; food gets more expensive; and it gets more expensive for cities more than it gets more expensive for rural areas.

That's... subsidizing. For cities. We live in an interconnected economic system. The fact that cities make more tax revenue, then export some of that tax revenue to rural areas to support their public infrastructure, does not mean cities are subsidizing rural areas. It means that cities need rural areas to survive, or at the very least, to keep costs affordable.

> Food is an incredibly substitutable market, you'd expect the market to push prices down to a minimum.

This is largely the reason why we have subsidies for farming: we're not okay with substituting domestic agriculture for foreign imports, due to the risks involved. Consider the case of manufacturing, which is also a largely substitutable market.

In the late 20th and early 21st century, the USA hollowed out loads of our manufacturing hubs in pursuit of lower prices, and this worked as advertised; costs dropped! With circumstances changing and a desire to perform more domestic manufacturing, though, we've lost a lot of our options. The USA has lost a lot of manufacturing nous and industry momentum, meaning that there's a lot of upstart cost to get back into the game.

While subsidizing an industry may not be efficient from a global market perspective, it can be very sensible from a national policy perspective, since it means that you can build an experienced workforce and institutional knowledge within a given domain.

This isn't as clear cut as you are making it. A lot of infrastructure haa pushed the price of food down. As prices go down, so do margins. Making a living as a farm hand has better margins without the interstate highway system for example.

The supposed "subsidies" to rural areas are the cost of creating the low prices which cities also reap a lot of benefit from. You in fact could not easily substitute rural monoculture for something else. Not at today's prices.

>Not to fault you, but you're a seriously urban-centric thinker. Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods.

This is a thread about someone who wants to do computer work remotely in a "rural tech community". I have a hard time seeing what that has to do with farms.

Small towns can be sustainable. The problematic sort of development is the purely residential carscape built just outside of town but driving in to use any services. See e.g. Wattsville, VA with attendant gated community Trail's End, featuring half the local population and one small overpriced convenience store.

https://postimg.cc/vx4Ws884

It's important to understanding how just wrong the thinking behind this comment is.

"Everyone needs X" does NOT mean that it's impossible for X to be subsidized, or for "the place that produces X" to be subsidized.

> Flip this on it's head and we see that rural communities are providing a huge subsidy to urban communities in the form of labor and commodities.

That's not how economics works. That's not how any of this works.

If rural areas are getting a disproportionate amount of government spending, then they're (probably) getting subsidized. That they produce things that the urban dwellers need doesn't change that.

Just like if a big city gets a huge federal grant for a new subway system, that's probably a subsidy*, even if the big city produces things that people in rural areas use.

* Though you can argue that the question of whether something is a subsidy is really more about whether the area gets a certain amount of money in total, rather than claiming any form of federal/state spending is a subsidy automatically

Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc.

Subsidizing agriculture isn’t a “rural” subsidy, it’s a “population” subsidy.

> Subsidizing agriculture isn’t a “rural” subsidy, it’s a “population” subsidy.

It's both, actually. Just like if the government started paying for free, say, cloud storage, regardless of where anyone lives, that'd be a population subsidy on the consumer side, and an area/industry-specific subsidy on the producer side.

> Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc.

Irrelevant. People need transportation, too, but if the government starts buying people bikes and cars, that's a subsidy.

Note that nobody's calling for the federal government to spend zero money in rural areas, when they talk about subsidies, they usually mean spending a disproportionate amount of money there. What "disproportionate" means is itself a question -- I think the most logical definition is "gets more federal $ in spending than they send to DC in tax revenue" but you could argue otherwise.

> Note that nobody's calling for the federal government to spend zero money in rural areas, when they talk about subsidies, they usually mean spending a disproportionate amount of money there.

This is interesting because I think this is the heart of a disagreement between urban and rural folks.

From the urban side, there's the perspective of "we're sending more to the government than the government is spending on us!". This is totally valid, and can be frustrating as a city-dweller. This is also exactly what we'd expect, though, given that the whole conceit of cities is that they introduce economies of scale and industrial concentration. Cities specialize at producing a lot of value without taking as much infrastructure or upkeep.

From the rural side, though, there's the opposite perspective. Of course there's more of a maintenance cost: you can't centralize ten-thousand acres of farmland, it is expansive by its definition. Likewise, you can't centralize resource extraction: the resources exist where they exist, and at the density they exist. A local mining operation may only need a few dozen workers, but those workers need roads, electricity, water, and housing which cannot scale. The purpose of this disproportionate spending and investment is to make possible the economies of scale within cities that consume this rural output.

A simple metaphor here is the idea of organs within the body. Your gut subsidizes the rest of your body calorie-wise: your intestines send far more calories to the rest of your body than they consume. Then again, of course they do, because if they didn't they would serve no benefit.

Cities may consume a lot of resources, but produce disproportionately more money. Rural areas may consume a lot of money, but produce disproportionately more resources. This is to be expected, since they're each specializing in separate things. If we're expecting farmlands to be as economically efficient as cities, then it's only fair to expect cities to be as agriculturally efficient as rural areas.

I'm not arguing if it's a subsidy, I'm arguing who benefits.

You can't grow enough food for a city within city limits. So if a subsidy goes to a rural area to grow food, that's not a subsidy for rural people, that's a subsidy for everyone.

As I already said, it's a subsidy for everyone on the consumer side, and a subsidy for that industry (which is located in rural areas, largely) on the producer side.

And the benefit is debatable. Yes, it lowers prices a tiny bit, but you could lower all kinds of costs through government producer subsidies, and yet not all of those would be of great or even net benefit.

Glad we agree then!

Increasingly, many of these rural primary industries will need on site tech workers as well.

Rural Canada is where I'm located at the moment. I tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.

Cities are the centers of knowledge work and financialization, not heavy industries and agriculture people need to survive. Humanity could live without cities, we did before, but it couldn’t live without what makes cities possible from afar.

Try tilling 40 acres with a horse. Imagine getting sick, or giving birth.

We lived without cities, but with a vastly lower population and quality of life. Things like knowledge work and financialization are what made possible great ventures such as energy distribution, transportation, mechanized farming, medicines, and so forth. I'm not sure agriculture would even sustain the existing rural population without the infrastructure of a complex modern economy.

We're all in this together.

Somehow I doubt that GP was arguing that literally 0% of the population would be outside of cities.

How can you say unsustainable when rural communities are where food comes from? Mass famine is unsustainable...

I wouldn't call them "unsustainable" because even though I disagree with the subsidies I think they're pretty easy to sustain.

But your reasoning makes no sense. You don't need subsidies to have food. Here's a study on farm subsidies that found that removing them would increase prices only slightly for most goods: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.agri-pulse.com%2Fa...

> The impact of premium subsidies – which work as discounts on the amount that farmers pay for crop insurance - varies widely depending on the crop and the policy. The price of corn, which is primarily used for livestock feed, would rise by nearly 5 percent if the subsidy were withdrawn, which would hurt livestock operations as well as foreign customers and ethanol producers.

> Lusk says that removing subsidies would lead to at least small price increases for all foods, with the largest increase, of 1 percent, for eggs. Meat prices would be about 0.55 percent higher. Fruit and vegetable growers also benefit from the insurance, so prices for those crops would rise by 0.67 percent, Lusk found. The price of dairy products would be 0.14 percent higher.

The argument is you can’t have cities without rural areas supplying what they need.

To disprove that you need cities that are self-sufficient.

Subsidies don’t matter in that question.

Uhh no, who was arguing that you can have cities without anyone in rural areas? This just looks like another ridiculous straw man.

> cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state

Was what the whole thread started with.

That says nothing about there being nobody in rural areas, just fewer people, and it being an unsustainable welfare state obviously refers to the current subsidies.

So yeah, it was a straw man on your part.

> tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency

This is why cities came about in the first place.

> that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.

It's not the case that all rural areas are subsidized in the way those in the US often are.

It seems peculiar to me that there is no standard process for the winding down of city governance when population dwindles. It's probably just the human element. I don't mean to be promoting some sort of libertarian "self-governance is great!" philosophy, just thinking out loud.

Imagine a city building game where city expenses increase with each population milestone (due to new positions in local government, new departments, etc.). One would naturally expect that if the city population were to drop below a specific threshold, the appropriate departments would be wound down to curb expenditure. If there aren't enough people to economically support a parks department, then (sadly) let the parks go wild.

Perhaps it's just hard to fire someone because an algorithm told you to do so. Real life is messy, after all.

It was simply never anticipated so why would you have such a thing. Plus people do still live in the Rust Belt and rural areas around it so it's all "working just fine still".

One thing that's interesting: around where I live, property lines are defined by stone walls and you see tons of rando stone walls in the middle of the forest. Then if you do some research you find that 100% of all the trees were clear-cut back in colonial times and all the trees you see today are under 100 years old (yet it's a verdant forest during the summer). There used to be a ton more people - easily 10x - but the existing political structures are the same and mostly still work well enough.

This is true of almost the entirety of the US.

I'd love more info about these kinds of things, I find it quite fascinating to read about places going through it and watching parts of town locally dealing with it.

Also - pensions!

I feel we need more education for citizens about how public pensions and other retirement benefits work - as they can be a huge drain when the money is good, even more of a piece of the pie when the money goes down.

Yup, I think government should be forbidden from making any contract where they owe money in the future for wages paid today. Today's taxpayer pays for services rendered thirty years ago and today; no wonder our services get worse every year.

For example, Seattle had a mayor Ed Murray. His couple year tenure resulted in the state needing to pay $80k/year more until he dies, so probably $3 million. That should have come out of that year's budget. The city should not have been able to obligate others to pay that.

Cities and villages can be dissolved by the same mechanisms by which they're incorporated. The process is peculiar to the state in which the corporation is held.

You can wind down certain things, but at what point are you winding down stuff that's more on the necessity side of things? The US has a lot of crumbling infrastructure that needs repair and replacement and I don't think people want to be told "sorry, your house is only accessible by off-road vehicle now." We're spending over $20B to increase rural broadband because people in rural areas don't want to be told "sorry, the population has dropped below a certain threshold so we're winding down the internet in your area to curb expenditure." (And before someone talks about Starlink, SpaceX is looking to get a lot of that money).

I think it's also not just about the emotions of firing someone. It's really hard to manage a downward trend - and not from a touchy-feely standpoint. If you're an uncaring machine and people leave, you fire a proportional number of government employees. But that doesn't solve the situation. Every business in the area now has fewer customers. At some point, those businesses close reducing tax revenue further and increasing unemployment more. It's not just the city that feels the pinch of a dwindling tax base - that dwindling tax base means there's also a dwindling consumer base.

An important thing to remember is that cities/towns/counties often take out debt for spending that will pay off over time. For example, you want to build a school so you borrow $X and you'll pay it back over the next 30 years. You need to rebuild some roads so you borrow and pay it back over the next 30 years. However, if your population is dwindling, that can leave the town holding debt it can't really pay anymore. If you built a school for 1,000 students and then the population dwindles by 30% over the next 20 years, you're stuck paying for way more school than you need with fewer people paying for it. Ok, layoff some teachers - but you have to lay off more then 30% of the teachers because you're paying for 100% of the school debt and maintenance costs. So you fire 40-50% of the teachers, class sizes go up, the people with the best options (the most educated with the best job opportunities and most money) leave your town eroding the richest part of your tax base and leaving lower income people on the hook for that debt while they escape it...which causes you to fire more teachers which causes more people to leave...

I think it's not just that there's a messy human side to it, but that it's hard to manage decline. Ok, you wind down a department. What about the building? Maybe you can sell it, but probably at a loss since you have a declining purchasing base. As you wind down a parks department or library, the richest people are likely to leave. Now your algorithm requires more cuts.

And the sad state of it is that it's often not a parks department. It can be things like roads or safe drinking water.

There is also a messy human side of it as well, for sure, but it's just hard to manage decline. I can totally see the game: you cut the parks department and the rich people complain, sell their house for 15% below previous market value and leave, and your tax base dwindles more. You cut after-school programs and more rich people complain about the town and schools and leave - and your tax base dwindles more. You try to attract new residents to YouVille and cartoon characters say, "I want a town that invests in its schools," and "everyone I know is talking about leaving YouVille."

> It can be things like roads or safe drinking water.

In most rural areas the roads are maintained by the county outside the town, and people maintain their own drinking water using wells. You pay someone to drill you a new well if it runs dry, and you're responsible for maintaining your own pumping system and getting your water regularly tested and treated if necessary. I have no idea what you're on about... rural areas don't work the way you are describing, you've obviously never lived in a rural area.

Why would it matter one bit whether the county or the town pay for road maintenance? In either case the cost burden is going to fall on the taxpayers, and if area population declines, the each person is going to have to pay more or accept their roads falling into disrepair

It's like you're purposely misreading what they wrote. Did you miss this part?

> An important thing to remember is that cities/towns/counties often take out debt for spending that will pay off over time.

They are very obviously talking about 'decline' in general at this point, not exclusively rural areas where most people or everyone gets their water from wells.

Hell, just look at the comment they're replying to:

> It seems peculiar to me that there is no standard process for the winding down of city governance when population dwindles.

> The US has a lot of crumbling infrastructure that needs repair and replacement and I don't think people want to be told "sorry, your house is only accessible by off-road vehicle now."

This is probably necessary in some respects. The US has an enormous number of lane-miles per inhabitant. There's a lot of subsidizing going on here that doesn't necessarily look like subsidizing, because the way the road network operates is just ingrained into our culture.

I just wanted to say your walls of text are very offensive, inaccurate, and read as someone who has never lived in a rural community.

Can you spend some time pointing out a few of the specific inaccuracies from your perspective?

I'm guessing the part about being unfriendly to non-white people is a big part of what's offensive. may or may not be true, but people tend to react poorly to sweeping negative judgments about the place where they live. on top of that, the analysis of how roads and water work is not quite right.

the overall point about the tax base death spiral is true though. it's really hard to wind down infrastructure that's been built out to support a certain population size. this happens in cities too, it's a major issue in baltimore, for example.

I will try to, but it's an overwhelming amount of generalizations, characterizations, and talking points.

I mainly wanted to voice my disdain and alert others to take what he said with a grain of salt.

For now, I would reference you to other comments that have disputed parts of what he said:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31129696

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31129451

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31129728

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31129451

This is your idea of a good comment?

> Hi there. I guess you are having a day of bad luck or something, cause you managed to get me to reply to you. heh.

> I'm basically the walking oxymoron of your example. I was raised rurally, and am more educated than many city slicks. I'm not religious, or poor. Not rich, but not destitute. And as far as my political leanings go, I figure I'm above all of you, because the center was killed by extremists, so there is nothing left but to act better than the rest of you.

I feel like my eyeballs are already about to roll back out of my skull, and that's just the first two paragraphs!

I grew up rural. I regularly visit home once or twice a year. He’s not wrong.

My friends growing up were pretty much the exceptions. We moved out, got advanced degrees, and almost all of live in major metro areas. The two that don’t, live in college towns, which are they’re own thing.

The main economic driver, the coal mines, all closed, and pretty much everyone with half a brain moved away. Those that are left… well, they’re stereotypes.

Last time my friends an I got together back where we grew up, we talked about it. The place has changed, and not for the best. As one friend put it, “It’s gotten more churchy, and not in a good way.” It’s meth labs, gun stores, video slots, end times evangelical churches, and militias.

Now you can make your own community anywhere you are, but it’s harder in rural areas. A lot harder. There’s just fewer people, less opportunities, and less appeal for the right kind of weirdos.

Wow

I feel like there's a huge semantic disconnect in this thread about the meaning of "rural". You and the grandparent seem to be using it to mean small suburbs/exurbs in economically declining regions of the US (e.g. The Rust Belt), not what it actually means which is farm towns and mostly farm land / private land disparately spread out with primarily county-level governance.

I'm also a big fan of StrongTowns, and I don't think what the grandparent is describing accurately reflects rural life.

Most of these small "farm towns" no longer have a majority of their population engaged in agriculture. The economic landscape of rural america has shifted profoundly in the past 50 years and a lot of these places are functionally exurbs now - populated by people who are economically dependent on nearby metro areas but choose to live/remain in small towns for lifestyle reasons.

Also, I happen to be born and raised in the area the Strong Towns guy calls home, and while I don't follow his work closely I can say the abstracted rural community he builds his theses around has a very loose relationship to the actual semi-rural communities he has spent his life living and working in.

There sort of is, in the form of merging governing bodies and/or consolidating public services. This lets one entity size them appropriately to the budget, in exchange for giving up the ability for smaller entities to more effectively concentrate services in one area of a county or township.

There is but it is often followed more in the breach, see the case of Damascus, OR.

There’s no standard process because it’s a separate thing each time.

But cities do die and usually bequeath everything to a nearby city or the county.

You're getting a lot of very bad comments in opposition, which is unfortunate.

A lot of people have no trouble being clear-eyed about the downsides for big cities -- expensive, crowded, lots of traffic, can be hyper-competitive, people are ruder or more indifferent, child unfriendly, more hostility to conservatism/religiosity, etc. -- but get offended when someone is equally clear-eyed about rural areas. I'm guessing that's because they interpret it as "punching down".

There may be more or more serious downsides to rural areas, of course; after all, they are gradually losing people to urban areas, people are voting with their feet. It would be bizarre if that were occurring and there weren't more serious downsides to the rural areas.

I don't think the parent comment is getting bad comments in opposition because people aren't "clear-eyed about rural areas". I think it's more likely because the parent comment lists all of the attributes of urban areas in a positive tone and all the attributes of a rural area in a negative tone. I think most people are well balanced in their opinions on urban vs. rural life, and realize there are pros and cons to both. It would have been nice if the parent comment listed a well balanced opinion instead of a heavily one sided opinion.

And maybe I'm misinterpreting the parent comment as well and I feel like the comments about rural areas were negative because of my bias. That could be the case, but I'm inclined to believe that the parent comment was quite biased in favor of urban areas.

It's a word of caution about rural areas. If you were cautioning someone about moving from a farm to the big city, you'd do the same thing with mostly listing negatives of big cities. I see this all the time in discussion of FAANG and the big tech hubs, people talking about the various downsides (which, to be sure, are many).

And if you look at the comments in response, a lot of them are obviously offended and throwing out misinformation and straw men. They're very bad comments from people either not thinking clearly or arguing disingenuously.

There are some rural areas that fit your description, but many that do not, and are quite nice places to live.

Also, urban areas generally have very high concentrations of uneducated, addicted, and poverty stricken individuals as well, and the proportion of the population that fits this bill has increased dramatically in the past few years.

>the proportion of the population that fits this bill has increased dramatically in the past few years.

Wait really? Source?

The number of tents, needles, etc. found on sidewalks and in parks/open areas.

> Are you white, male, straight, Christian, etc.? A lot of rural places can become easier if you tick those boxes. If you don't tick those boxes, then you might start wondering how you might be treated differently from living in the city.

I really loved the depiction in Lovecraft Country when the protagonists (black American) were pulled over and given a courtesy notice by the police officer that they were in a "sundown county", where after sunset they would be arrested or killed by that very same police officer.

The sun was setting and they had to get to the next county over before the sun set, but would also meet this same fate if they were driving over the speed limit.

Drama ensues as the police car follows them to the county edge, all at the speed limit.

Now, from the oral and recorded history of people around me - continually dismissed by the white majority from all political leanings - I knew the plot "twist": the next county over was a sundown county too.

Sure enough, at the county line, a line of other police officers wait and capture them, waiting to harass them until justifying killing them, execution style.

I liked that fictional depiction because I hadn't seen it portrayed before, I liked that the show wasn't trying to be about the difficulties of being black American (because many shows with black cast and direction wind up being soap boxes about exactly that, a way for marginalized directors to "finally use their platform"), this show was mostly different while incorporating some plausible realities. Like, what if we did the show Supernatural, where Dean and Sam Winchster wanted to chase demons across America but were black Americans in the 1940s, there would simply be additional shit they would have to continually deal with, nearly indistinguishable from the demons and what the demons would do!

I live near where they tried to unionize amazon and yes, it’s like that, but also your description seems like you haven’t lived in these places you describe. Yes, we’re rural and conservative and backwards, in pockets, but there are pockets that aren’t. It’s not a monolith. You won’t be alone and the only one paying taxes for roads.

Edit: and where you see something worth abandoning, i see opportunity for growth and improvement

I appreciate your point about population decline as that isn't something I had considered at all.

Maybe rural doesn't capture what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure of a better word and it does capture the feeling. I would like at least 4 acres and some privacy at the very least. Then the question becomes what I'd have to give up to get that. It definitely means giving up living in a big city, but maybe it doesn't mean giving up a small city/town.