They're also heavily subsidized to make them "work", a considerable piece of rural America would already be gone if there wasn't a large amount of government funds being diverted to keep it alive and we will spend even more as it becomes less and less desirable to live there.
As soon as WFH became an option people flocked away from cities. NYC lost 200k people over two years; SF lost 60k. I would say there is a large population of city folk who desire to move to more rural areas.
Yes. Other/smaller cities, college towns, etc. I'm sure some have taken the opportunity to move somewhere that looks more like rural--but I have to believe the lifestyle shift would be a bridge too far for most.
It's not really true of the Bay Area--and it's at least complicated around Manhattan. But a lot of cities like Boston an hour or an hour and a bit drive in reverse commute, much less weekend, traffic can bring you to a lot cheaper housing. There are expensive suburbs too. However, it's pretty easy to find suburban or exurban towns that are accessible to Boston for an evening event that have relatively modest home prices. Not Midwest cheap but reasonable. (Of course there are very expensive towns as well.)
Sure but what would that have to do with subsidization?
What’s the GDP of New York City versus upstate?
As an aside this silly concept of “rural/urban divide” is just that.
Silly.
We need farms and farmers to feed us, it’s ok to subsidize some of these places so that happens.
It’s also ok for the people doing the subsidization to ask the rural people to stop complaining about “socialism” or other nonsense when they’re the primary benefactors of handouts.
What would the GDP of NYC be, if NYC didn't have a near monopoly on the proximity to high paying jobs in NY State? If every NYC job (aside from those that absolutely required people to work on-site) allowed full time WFH, my bet is that it would be significantly lower. And people with high paying wages would be more scattered around the state, requiring less subsidizing. It would also mean that not every highly educated person moves away to the city. Part of the reason urban and rural politics is so divided is that every smart kid from a small town goes away to college and never comes back. Some because they have no desire, but others because the job they want doesn't exist outside a metro.
There may be some element of truth to that, but jobs aren’t the only reason why highly employable young people tend to move to urban areas. There’s other big reasons, like there being a lot more to things to do and a vastly wider variety of large hobby/interest communities and cultures in urban areas.
This is why the bulk of people moving away from city centers during the pandemic moved to cheaper cities or the suburban metros surrounding cities rather than small towns, and unless small towns stop being small towns it’s not going to change.
