There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.
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America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.
According to a recent Agriculture Department estimate, the rural population did rebound by 0.25 percent from 2020 to 2022 as some families decamped from urban areas during the pandemic.
But demographers say they are still evaluating whether that trend will continue, and if so, where. Pennsylvania has been particularly afflicted. Job losses in the manufacturing and energy industries that began in the 1980s prompted many younger families to relocate to Sun Belt states. The relocations helped fuel population surges in places like Texas and Georgia. But here, two-thirds of the state’s 67 counties have experienced a drop in population in recent years.
- “younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs”
- “many residents in this deeply Republican town”
gee, I can’t imagine why young people would want to leave such a stagnant regressive environment …
Yeah, who could even begin to guess…
No duh. Have you ever been out there? Sure, it’s pretty, but that’s it. Absolutely nothing to do. Except meth. Oh, and drunk driving and KKK rallies.
Food and flower gardening, community or personal, waking, biking, swimming in rivers, fishing, sewing, knitting, getting to know your neighbors, barbecuing on wood or charcoal, building treehouses and swings, book clubs, picking up litter, mutual aid, sitting around and singing/playing instruments/swapping stories or making up tales to entertain children and each other, reading, pick up basketball/football/soccer/hackeysack, ride horses, hunt, fish, ride horses, dirt bikes, cards, dominoes, bird watching, butterfly watching. Board games, video games, potlucks. Plenty of stuff to do, it’s just usually a slower-paced activity.
I see you’ve been to my hometown.
The other person that replied did mention a lot of cool things you can do in a rural community. But being half an hour from a grocery store that has something I actually want at a price that’s reasonable (as reasonable as groceries get, I guess) sucks.
This is because of SOCIALISM! And if not Socialism it’s because of IMMIGRANTS WHO DON’T EVEN LIVE IN THESE COMMUNITIES! But it 100% is NOT due to Racism or Capitalism killing off Job Opportunities or Bigots or Catholics wanting to Legislate your Bedroom. No it’s DEFINITELY Communist Immigrants causing this!
Yeah, young folks are moving away because they’ve been indoctrinated in liberal college institutions and lured by a gay communist urban agenda to destroy rural America and bring about the decline of Christian conservative values! Nothing at all to do with capital consolidation and market monopolization resulting in reductions of diversified local markets and diminished job prospects! Increased cultural exposure due to accessing instantaneous global communications and social media? No way that has any influence in the decisions people make about what cultural environment they’d prefer to raise their children in. SmallTown USA is the best place to escape all the scary ideas that exist in the world, like equality among gender and race, and socializing the excesses of the private. Who would want to live in that kind of world?!
Remote work.
Build homes in the echoes of cities instead of gentrifying shit holes.
Repurpose the corporate offices into affordable housing to fix the growing homelessness problems.
Create less car dependent infrastructure
Make more high density areas car free, and build affordable housing over the parking areas.
Subsidize farms if they use green tech. Subsidize them more if they’re smaller to reincitiveize small farms.
Abolish any ability for any corporation from owning any land not zoned for corporate use. Corporations may not own homes.
Did I mention remote work?
I’d add corporate farms should not get subsidies.
the more subsidies, the more transparent EVERYTHING about their operation has to be
That’s been a general movement away from rural America for decades (and people have been leaving the countryside to make their fortune in the big city for centuries). However, this line stood out to me because of the timeframe cited:
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023.
Maybe I’m just still bitter, but maybe they should have tried social distancing, wearing masks, and getting vaccinated.
Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.
The decline is threefold:
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Agriculture is getting significantly more efficient. You don’t need 300 people do backbreaking labor for 12 hours a day in the beating sun anymore. We have automated threshers.
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Industries are shifting. We generally moved away from manufacturing and an extraction-based economy. (Though the former is recovering, thanks to Biden’s awesome investment plan)
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jobs are moving to cities, where there are more schools, hospitals, high paying jobs, and may be more resilient to climate change.
Personally, I’d never ever consider moving anywhere rural for the aforementioned reasons, but also because rural americans are against my type family, and I don’t care to be the queer pioneer family for them to realize we aren’t so bad. I also never want to drive a car for a half hour+ for basic supplies or to see friends. It’s too lonely. We have rail and ebikes here. I can get to the store or a friend’s in less than 10 minutes.
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