There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.
…
America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.
According to a recent Agriculture Department estimate, the rural population did rebound by 0.25 percent from 2020 to 2022 as some families decamped from urban areas during the pandemic.
But demographers say they are still evaluating whether that trend will continue, and if so, where. Pennsylvania has been particularly afflicted. Job losses in the manufacturing and energy industries that began in the 1980s prompted many younger families to relocate to Sun Belt states. The relocations helped fuel population surges in places like Texas and Georgia. But here, two-thirds of the state’s 67 counties have experienced a drop in population in recent years.
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.
Right.
Honestly for as much “woe is me” that they crammed into this piece, my takeaway was mostly just, “Hmmm…good.”
Like…I love rural PA, I’m just not wild about a lot of the people who live there. They vote against my own interests (and theirs), disproportionately influence state government, and welcome corporations that proudly destroy the environment while taking a hostile stance toward anyone not like them.
This isn’t down to every last person, of course, but broadly speaking, the ones who aren’t fitting that template are also not the ones doing most of the dying.
So the piece is reading, to me, more as, “the people most responsible for keeping the shitty aspects of Pennsylvania shitty are dying faster than they’re breeding”…which is good news for the more reasonable residents of the state.
This is not limited to the United States either.
Urbanisation and the growth of cities is across the industrialised world.
For example, while Japan’s population shrinks, Tokyo is growing.
I wonder how far this will go - will the industrialized world see more ghost towns?
We’ll probably live to see robot towns, where a small contingent of maintenence workers keep a huge fleet of automated farming/processing/shipping equipment operational. If they’re lucky Monsanto will buy a restaurant chain so there’s somewhere for them to eat nearby.
This stood out to me as well, the conservative stance on C-19 and the resulting general negligence seems a very obvious major factor to the rural population decline in this timeframe.
It would add a temporary valley into a graph that was already trending down.
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.
I see you’ve been to my hometown.
The other person that replied did mention a lot of cool things you can do in a rural community. But being half an hour from a grocery store that has something I actually want at a price that’s reasonable (as reasonable as groceries get, I guess) sucks.
Fucking exactly.
Oh, I need bread, shit. Gotta get in the car and drive 60 miles an hour for 25 minutes each way. Great.
There are definitely tradeoffs.
Not hyperbole. If someone pointed a gun at me and told me that they would shot me if I don’t agree to move back to my sub-500 people Northern Appalachian village I would help that mother fucker load the gun.
Word
Ah you’ve met my in-laws i see!
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.
Literally all of that I can do in an urban area. Especially video games. I know this is shocking to you but us city people have video games. Jesus
No one said you couldn’t/didn’t.
While this is indeed a list, it pales in comparison to what you can do in or near a large city.
I enjoy a ton of things on your list but there’s stuff you just can’t easily do outside of a metro area. Especially stuff you need a specialized teacher for.
I’m in an online class now with an instructor who merely reads the chapter previously assigned as homework and won’t answer questions about anything other than their social activities. In an ivy League University area. Conversely an instructor in tiny little Katy, TX a couple of years ago and originally from Alabama gave plenty of homework, had well - planned classes, actually thoroughly explained independent reading material, and also could answer in-depth questions on an ELI 5 level. It’s more to do with personal ability, interest and integrity and actually caring about/liking the job.
Katy ain’t tiny. Well, in and of itself it is but it’s part of the Houston metro. I live off the Energy Corridor. I can be in Katy in a few minutes. I can also be at a dozen grocery stores, an insane number of taco trucks, any type of bar you’d care to visit, escape rooms, several gyms (I’ve recently started rock climbing in one again!), and shit loads of white collar industry for a good paying job within a few minutes. My first IT job making more than $125k was 10 minutes out of Katy. It’s suburban, not rural.
I stand corrected! She said it was tiny, and at the time, I had plenty of work keeping me busy! Thanks for the information!
No worries! It’s less than half an hour to downtown Houston from here at this time of night and probably right at half an hour from Katy proper.
I grew up in a true rural community of less than 1000. It was half an hour to the outskirts of the nearest city, and that place had 75,000 people. It was hours away from the outskirts of the closest REAL city, Dallas, with 1.3 million people. In contrast, Katy has 25,000 people and sits half an hour from the center of a city with 2.3 million people, nevermind the size of the metro area.
So if she lived on the west side of Katy, she was describing the place as she saw it and that’s not on you. A small place as compared to Houston, and more on the rural side of the suburbs. I take my motorcycle out that way because if you leave headed west it’s pretty empty for a while.
Thank you, for your magnanimity and description. Happy trails, friend.
Sounds awful.
It is until you realize (after a long adjustment period) that it’s pretty healthy, if you allow it to be.
I don’t see anything about diversity, having access to embassies, museums, universities, large businesses, etc. I just heard you say that you like to drive to all those places and have only one grocery store close by.
I’m not accepting your words in my mouth. What you think you heard is your business. Enjoy your evening at symphony. I’ve very much enjoyed mine.
This rural Pennsylvania town could get a huge population boom if they had a “we welcome queer people and migrants and we don’t tolerate hate” policy they announced to the world.
But of course, that’s way too far for them.
Remote work.
Build homes in the echoes of cities instead of gentrifying shit holes.
Repurpose the corporate offices into affordable housing to fix the growing homelessness problems.
Create less car dependent infrastructure
Make more high density areas car free, and build affordable housing over the parking areas.
Subsidize farms if they use green tech. Subsidize them more if they’re smaller to reincitiveize small farms.
Abolish any ability for any corporation from owning any land not zoned for corporate use. Corporations may not own homes.
Did I mention remote work?
Sadly, if you can remotely work from rural America, you can remotely work from rural India.
I’ve worked with India teams in 5 companies. Always bad. we need to rehire Americans to manage/oversight or redo. Ends up costing more. The code and website teams complaints never end but c level Don’t care.
End up bad, but for the first couple of quarters that “rock star” MBA has created huge short term profits. And is that what really matters in business these days…
Website example was a small private company with no investors. Like wtf? literally had to redo every web page and suddenly no one cares about the time spent. 6 months earler all huff and puffin “well India says they can do it in a month”. Worst part is they won’t acknowledge the months of work the US team put in to fix website. They only cared they had something even if it was trash.
Boondoggles/prolifrigates proliferate, unfortunately.
Lol no idea what you mean.
Basically that people and companies will spend a lot to save a little.
There are plenty of remote work jobs that are hiring globally now, not just the US or India. There are entire companies that are basically 100% ephemeral. Yes, it sucks for US workers that people in other countries are in the same job sandbox, but the jobs also exist. AI won’t change this either, you still need a person that knows the AI is belching out dogshit code, it’ll likely just reduce the number of code monkey jobs.
I’d add corporate farms should not get subsidies.
This is because of SOCIALISM! And if not Socialism it’s because of IMMIGRANTS WHO DON’T EVEN LIVE IN THESE COMMUNITIES! But it 100% is NOT due to Racism or Capitalism killing off Job Opportunities or Bigots or Catholics wanting to Legislate your Bedroom. No it’s DEFINITELY Communist Immigrants causing this!
Yeah, young folks are moving away because they’ve been indoctrinated in liberal college institutions and lured by a gay communist urban agenda to destroy rural America and bring about the decline of Christian conservative values! Nothing at all to do with capital consolidation and market monopolization resulting in reductions of diversified local markets and diminished job prospects! Increased cultural exposure due to accessing instantaneous global communications and social media? No way that has any influence in the decisions people make about what cultural environment they’d prefer to raise their children in. SmallTown USA is the best place to escape all the scary ideas that exist in the world, like equality among gender and race, and socializing the excesses of the private. Who would want to live in that kind of world?!
IMO, part of it has to do with Trumper school boards, weird conservative county commissioners voting to succeed and school library book bans. I live ‘out here’ and it gets worse every year.
Once upon a time you could entice youngsters to the countryside with promises of low cost of living, but then rural housing got super fucking expensive super fucking fast during the covid years. Like sure, maybe rural housing is still cheaper than suburban/urban housing (although this is HIGHLY location-specific), but gone are the days where you could buy a pretty nice house (or an iffy house on a sizable chunk of land) for less than the down payment on a house in a “desirable” area. You might be able to convince a middle-class 30- or 40-something American to live in the middle of nowhere in exchange for a good house they’re able to pay for in cash with change to spare (and with it the opportunity to retire a decade or so early). But once rural housing started needing mortgages to afford and buyers still had to deal with crap like bidding wars and sparse inventory, where’s the draw? At least in my state (Washington) rural housing inventory is finally going up and prices are starting to come down (although monthly payments are still at near-record highs if you need a mortgage), but it’s going to either be many years of incremental decline or a very sharp, very painful crash to return rural housing affordability to how it was.
Rural living was never cheap. When you factor in the lower salaries it was always always going to be the more expensive choice.
Plus the driving all over the place. That costs time in addition to the money.
The town I was born in is dying and its been going on since I was a kid. They were a wood mill town with three plants. They have made every bad decision that they could make. Turned down a paper mill and college before I was born. Turned down two manufacturing plants and a wal-mart after I was born. Consistently resisted chain restaurants and stores even after I had grown up and left. Then the world changed, manufacturing and new opportunities dried up completely and they still cling to the old way of doing things because they can’t see they are the problem.
Now its just a shell full of empty lots and rotting houses. The local mayor is still associated with the old families but still is only interested in protecting what they have. They keep getting elected and the place continues to deteriorate. In their minds its due to people like me leaving and all the poor and their children who are still clinging to bones of that town. Not their fault though. How could it be? They are better than everyone else.
This is the state of far too many small towns in the US today.
Waaah our town is dying! Why don’t any young folks want to stay here?
many residents in this deeply Republican town say they view Trump as having a better vision for salvaging rural America
The 1% can make their own wage slaves
Elon is working on it. Some of the women even consented freely.
I’m honestly concerned about this. No need for most people if you can just build your own labor.
They say neither Pennsylvania nor the nation can afford to lose small towns and the institutions that power them.
Lol, why?
Not only are they a touchstone of American life,
Very often a hard and poverty stricken life.
but they are also key to driving certain sectors of the economy, like agriculture.
What’s stopping farms from being built next to suburbs or even within cities with the tech we have now.
These boomers are why over romanticizing how “good” small town life was. What they’re really sad about is disproportionate political power our anti democratic electoral college gave them and the unchecked tin pot dictatorships they often held over small towns. Being able to get away with literal murder sometimes because they personally knew the cops and judges.
They couldn’t care less about the poor quality of life that most citizens of these small towns had. If they did they would have made the necessary investments to attract people (like a handful of small towns have).
Possible tin hat explanation: Suburbs/small towns lean conservative so preserving them is essential for conservatives to retain power.
And yet real estate prices remain at all time highs. Boomers asked for this.
The town I grew up in is in the middle of a cancer cluster. The largest factory (where most people work) got caught illegally dumping chemicals in the ground. They were just made to pay a relatively small fine. The corporation was threatening to move the plant somewhere else if it became too expensive to operate there, and all lawsuits were dismissed.
That factory, and most other factories in the area primarily just hire “temp” workers that they keep as temps for years, never actually hire them full time, and pay them near minimum wage with no benefits. Many young people who do end up staying in that area become drug addicts and die in their 20s or 30s.
There’s a lot of corruption in the local government and police as well. The police harass anybody they don’t like, and they know pretty much who everybody is and what they drive. A few people in government got caught embezzling money. A sheriff tried to frame somebody for murder. Also, I think the people in the courts have some kind of deal with the juvenile detention center, because they give kids very long sentences for minor things (6 months for being 10 minutes late to school while on probation in my case).
Small towns, in my experience, are shitholes with corrupt and authoritarian local governments, and are exploited by corporations in ways similar to third-world countries.
How are they becoming heavy drug addicts by being exposed to chemicals in a factory?
Also you talk about small towns being run by corrupt and authoritarian governments like you live in an anarchistic country.
Just listing reasons why small towns are shitholes… or at least that particular small town. People there are at a high risk of drug addiction because of “shit-life syndrome,” (which is arguably caused by the low wages of the factories).
But that’s a whole different reasoning than sticking it to “chemical factory work”
I wonder if climate change will drive people back to places like Pennsylvanian? Good water, forested, temperate.
It’s 100° in june.
That is boiling water temperatures
Not in freedom units, °F
Not for muricans
Nope. Rather live in a bad climate with progressive people than hateful people that infest most small towns.
Those rural people should start throwing cornstarch paint on stuff to raise awareness of this important issue
