Those small towns and small cities--more the small towns than the small cities, but often those too--have those "reasonable middle class lifestyles" largely due to wealth transfers from bigger economic centers.
As a large city dweller for my entire adult life that does not bother me, but it isn't a sustainable process without those economic engines external to them.
As soon as your middle-class farmer children finish high school they will be 1 of 3 (descending, from most likely to least):
- Leaving for the big city/college
- Staying in your small town, but slowly becoming helpless as they fall into bad crowds, bad habits, or both
- Staying in your small town, but successfully continuing the way of life
It is unsustainable in its current form, unless you inoculate your children against modern ideas and technology (like the Amish) or make it more desirable for people to stay. I will point to European villages as a counter example. And then I will point to: lack of cultural homogeneity, the tenuous nature of living in the United States without a stable and growing source of income, and a lack of spiritually-enriching outlets as reasons why people move out of small U.S. towns towards cities.
The first leads to unstable communities. The second leads to subconscious unease and anxiety. The last leads to a restlessness which to leads to various mental ailments like consumerism, that can only be fulfilled by staying on the hedonic treadmill.
I posit that it is not cities that have all the opportunities, but that it is small communities that lack them.
Small towns have fundamental economic problems that make living there a hard compromise. Third tier cities away from hot spot destinations can be comfortable places to live with much more affordable housing.
Not in my opinion, those smaller towns have largely (but not universally) abandoned the middle class ambition of home ownership through exclusionary land policy, despite not degrading their basic services.
Yes, the big difference is in the decay of small towns. There are far fewer middle class jobs than before, what can you really make in small towns that's competitive in the global economy?
Small towns are just inherently unsustainable in a globalized developed economy. Most of our economic activity comes from working with other people, that means the rational move is to move to where everyone else is, ie a city. Remote work can slow that process down, but it’s not reversing.
I think to a degree there's some equalization happening that small towns can't handle. I can't buy a gallon of milk for under 4$ anywhere in the urban area I live. Even if I drive up to walmart on the edge of the city. When I travel to smaller towns (which is a lot - I'm gone almost every weekend camping, exploring, biking, what have you) I'm often shocked at how places so far from transportation hubs can have goods so cheap.
I don't believe it's sustainable, and the more the economy becomes de-localized, the less it can be realistically sustained. I think small towns like this are in for further decline the more centralized commerce becomes. It saddens me to say this, but many of these small towns don't provide much for the current big company driven economy, so why should the big companies care?
It's a welcome side effect for local business and city services, as well as helping smooth out geographical income inequality. Small towns usually have short commutes, so it's not the same type of issue as places like Denver.
Most of the issues discussed in the article don't really apply to true 'small towns', but instead they're applicable to sprawled, growing suburban/exurban development near-ish larger cities. Small towns far from big cities don't tend to have growth in the form of housing developments, and have smaller infrastructure overhead.
In my hometown of 3,000 people, people living in the center of town have public water and sewer services, but everyone living farther out has wells and septic tanks. In a low density, low growth environment like this, the town doesn't need to be responsible for those things, and therefore stays out of debt and doesn't develop massive, unsustainable infrastructure.
>everyone moves to the big city
Sustainable infrastructure can exist at smaller scales as well. There is certainly boom in big cities right now, but smaller cities (25-100k people?), that had a bustling 'urban' core 100 years ago, are starting to come back. I think that these cities (many of which fell into decay after WWII) with walkable 'streetcar suburbs' and dense downtown areas, will become much more popular in the near future.
Interesting! Do you have a source for that? I’d like to learn more. Is it really small towns, or just suburbs/exurbs/bedroom communities? Regardless, it’s a good reason to focus on making housing more affordable in cities (build more!).
Personally I think the current socioeconomic trends are firmly against small towns and they're all dying and this will continue until something drastic changes.
For one, family farms have largely been replaced by agribusiness, which tends to be far more economical.
For another, employment and home ownership trends are bad for small towns. Employment is now more short-term. There are hardly any "jobs for life" now. This makes those with limited employment prospects (in that there are few employers in their area) particularly vulnerable to change. Home ownership makes the labour market as a whole less flexible/mobile.
The solution to these problems is urbanization.
What's more, the suburbs formed in WW2 with the explosion in private vehicle ownership and, for some reason, governments actively subsidized it. People will often declare (here and elsewhere) that they like to live in the suburbs. It's cheaper, the lots and houses are larger and so on. Thing is, no one is paying the true cost of this in terms of all the infrastructure to support it, be it roads, railways, utilities, schools, hospitals and so on.
If you look at the major urban centers, they tend to generate a surplus and that surplus is used to subsidize those that live outside that city. It's true in NYC. It's true in London.
At some point I expect this to end, which will strengthen the trend towards urbanization.
One problem is that construction pretty much everywhere is becoming unaffordable. This applies to housing and infrastructure. Homeowners get excited about their rising property values but that's pretty short term thinking. There was an article posted here last week about how all the cheap eats are disappearing from SF. Well, real estate costs (land + construction) are an input into literally everything. You simply can't have cheap services in an area with expensive real estate in the long term.
Construction costs are a real problem eg [1]. Australia, which once had a great standard of living, is now ridiculously expensive in local times. Honestly, it's like the whole country is Vancouver. IIRC the median house price in Sydney is now A$1.1m (up from ~$650k ~7 years ago).
I think this will change. Those small towns don't look so hot right now, and young people are leaving for the closest city because that's where the jobs are. The 'burbs will be fine but things don't look good for "small town America", a lot of towns could decay and disappear. Just because it's a deliberate lifestyle choice doesn't mean it's a sustainable one. Just look at the quality of housing stock, infrastructure, basic services like drinking water and jobs (or lack thereof) in these places, it's not a pretty picture.
I think that's part of the problem to solve. I think there's a happy medium: A town big enough to support a few large groceries and a couple of big box stores, but small enough to not be a traffic nightmare (hopefully walkable/bikable for most and maybe even with a small but efficient mass transit system). Very few people need to live in rural areas, anymore, but also few people need to live in the most populous and most expensive cities, except for the opportunities those bigger cities provide.
I guess I wasn't clear when saying that I think we should spread out again, I did not mean I think people should live on ranches or farms, 3 miles from their nearest neighbor and 30 miles to the nearest tiny town. That's not what the future looks like, I would hope. But, small to mid-sized towns can be reasonably dense, and can provide reasonable amenities. There are towns like this that don't get a lot of attention, and I tend to like to visit them (I'm parked in Eugene, Oregon right now, and both Eugene and Springfield match the description I've just given...though Eugene, in particular, is maybe on the large, and expensive, side of the model I'm envisioning). But, there are others: Asheville, NC and Denton, TX spring to mind as excellent examples. Real estate isn't super cheap in these cities, but it's not outrageous, either. There's plenty of shopping, plenty of entertainment, plenty of stuff to do and see, but without the soul-crushing traffic jams, and dehumanizing crowds, of (sort of) nearby Atlanta or Austin.
I am skeptical that this can scale well. Not every small town can have an expensive college or university.
And besides, the towns that do get/have these institutions become gentrified and all of the the original residents get pushed to nearby small towns by professionals from more affluent regions.
In the end you end up with an upscale, expensive small town and surrounding depressed blue collar towns.
I'm not sure this is ends up as utopian as you make it sound. I imagine a lot of people moving out of big cities will bring the big cities with them.
First you need your Starbucks. Then your brew pubs. Better roads and sanitary services. Amazon Prime two-day delivery.
Suddenly these rural small towns start looking a lot like exurbs in large metros. Not a total negative. A lot of small towns are in desperate need of economic infusion, but I don't believe you can transplant wealthy city dwellers into rural American without irrevocably changing the way of life in those places.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. What wealth exactly is exported from urban centers to small towns and rural communities? Tax revenue? Ya likely that.
Otherwise I'd argue the reverse. Banking, media, software etc. seem to export wealth from smaller communities back to urban centers. In this regard large urban centers can be regarded something as absentee landlords receiving grapes and oil and Amish furniture and exporting spreadsheets and compliance audits.
Small towns and semi-rural areas squander their land with the exact same ass-ugly car-centric public realms you'll find in the suburbs of major metro areas. They just get less attention for it since the land in question is abundant.
There are examples of small towns with good urbanism - a lot of college towns fit this bill - but they are so rare that they just replicate big-city level prices, without the high-productivity jobs to pay them.
There is a middle ground between a growing city and an abandoned town. I run a very small startup in this space and we work with towns who have a growing population but a shrinking downtown business core. Some people can't afford to live in the big cities, some want a lifestyle that they can't get in the city, some have other reasons, but there's a growing problem in the Midwest of bedroom communities. People move into small cities outside of Madison, Detroit, Indianapolis, etc and don't spend a single minute in the central business district. They don't spend a single dollar in the town they live in.
These people wake up in the morning and drive into the big city for work, which needs huge roads running through otherwise small residential areas. Now those roads are too dangerous to cross, so pedestrian traffic plummets. When the people come home, they get their family together and drive back to the big city to go to a concert, visit a museum, or get dinner. We've talked to so many people who live biking distance to their town's central business district but have never been there. They only live in Ada or Lowell, but they spend all their time and money in Grand Rapids. And Fulton Street isn't a road you'd want to walk across, because of all that traffic.
The way it works: a town was thriving with an engaged population spending time and money in the central business district. One person moves away, and someone else moves into their house. This new person is fleeing the big city, but is still economically tied to the big city (not the small town). Now imagine 20 or 30 houses go for sale in this town every year. After a few years, that's a major hit to the small town's economic prospects. Businesses start to close, which accelerates the problem. And many of the newcomers want to live in subdivisions rather than city limits, so houses in city limits are sitting just as vacant as the businesses, and the town has less tax revenue to fix any of the problems. So it gets worse year over year until the town dries up. The only thing left is the major road, the McDonalds, and the gas station. But the people living in those subdivisons just outside of city limits still need to get to the freeway, so the town has to maintain massive roads used mostly by people who aren't paying them any taxes.
This is the story of hundreds of towns in every Midwestern state, tens of thousands of towns across the country. We're building a network of four lane roads through the ruins of small towns and leaving the city council to pay for infrastructure no one is using anymore, with tax income they don't have anymore, for citizens who don't spend any time or money in those towns.
As a large city dweller for my entire adult life that does not bother me, but it isn't a sustainable process without those economic engines external to them.
reply