While all that might be true, it is also true that hardly anyone would be willing to cover the true cost of living in rural areas far away from things. In pretty much every country I'm aware of the urban population is strongly subsidising the rural. And that is only covering first order cost (just look at the massive subsidies to get broadband to rural communities), if we would put prizes on second order cost like pollution, CO2... rural living would become unpopular very quickly (the reality already is that there is a massive move into the cities not the other way around).
You seem to be assuming that rural availability at cost above what people are willing to pay is desirable.
The fact is that there are costs and benefits to living in a rural area. Rent is cheaper. Land is abundant. Infrastructure is more expensive. Similarly for city folk, land is expensive, rent is high, but economies of scale make fast internet feasible.
There is no compelling reason that people in cities should be subsidizing rural people, apart from rural congresscritters attempting to buy votes. And if there were such a reason, lets do it honestly: raise taxes in cities and funnel the money directly to rural areas.
Providing subsidies for people to live in rural areas is not a good thing. It's much more efficient for people to live in centralized locations. People in urban areas are almost always subsidizing people living in suburban or rural areas.
The problem is that rural and suburban living is heavily subsidized in relation to urban living, which has economies of scale. This doesn't even factor in things like per-capita pollution. If people who would "rather" live a certain way actually paid their fair share (e.g. for negative externalities) it'd be a different story.
Rural areas already get massive subsides in the US. Wasting even more money on them simply drags down society for zero net benefit because those resources are very much better spent where the impact vastly more people.
As to taking a loss on their home. That's already happened, staying there vs renting somewhere else has significant direct costs. If a community can survive on it's own then awesome, but subsidies are simply a terrible idea.
The article was focusing on the environmental impact of different living situations, and rural living is horrifically environmentally unfriendly. It would also be financially untenable if rural areas weren’t massively subsidized by urban economic centers. If you had to pay for the true cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure you use (which would be amortized over very few people due to the low population density) you wouldn’t be bragging about how cheap rural living is.
Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.
We already heavily subsidize rural living in the US, no reason we couldn't just offset the emissions necessary to deliver goods to rural areas and encourage urbanization (which is not where most emissions are coming from).
Then could it be that the subsidies are the only thing making rural life livable for many people? In other words, without the subsidy, the economy would be so depressed that people would move to cities.
As I said, there is a subset of the population that would never live in a city, just as there is a subset that would never live outside a city. But I think that encouraging more people to choose the rural lifestyle by essentially subsidizing it is not the way to go.
It's difficult to square urban vs rural interests without creating a tyranny of a majority/minority on either side. Dense urban areas already subsidize rural and even suburban infrastructure and use less resources. Proposing that urban areas tax themselves even more to limit pollution isn't very equitable either.
The fact of the matter is that current CO2 emissions are unsustainable, and we have no choice but to address the issue. That might mean that some may need to go to the grocery store more than bimonthly.
If you really want to see it in a zero sum way, which I disagree with, you need to realize that those living in suburbia or in rural areas are the lowest common denominators. Paying for their lifestyle is why taxes in cities are so high and why laws in cities are so harsh.
It is logistically impossible for the people that live outside cities to have anywhere near the quality of life they currently enjoy without the existence of people living in cities.
Indeed, without subsidies paid for by city folk, agricultural prices would plummet and become unstable, which would greatly hamper the prosperity of anyone related to the agricultural sector.
Without cities, it would also be impossible to pay for the infrastructure enjoyed by suburbia and rural areas. The amount and quality of roads would have to decrease drastically, and suburbs would have to pay multiple times more for running water, electricity infrastructure, wastewater management (you would have to move to a septic tank with all of the costs those entail). This would have knock-on effects increasing the prices of all goods and it would make transportation either very expensive or impossible.
This would lead to a complete collapse of rural and suburban life in North America.
If you want to know what that would look like, you can envision life in rural China, or somewhat worse even.
Urbanisation is absolutely necessary for the quality of life you enjoy. In the relationship, despite it being mutually beneficial, those who live in rural areas are the ones who are moreso compensated. As for suburbia, it's not clear that it is beneficial at all to those who live in cities.
Building infrastructure to remote regions is expensive. There is an honest debate to be had about America’s penchant for subsidising rural and suburban living at the expense of cheaper, greener urban lifestyles.
You should look up the costs of supporting rural living. They're heavily subsidized, at least in the US. Living in rural communities is cheaper to the individual right now, but significantly more expensive to society overall. If you can find data to the contrary I'd be interested in it.
Lots of utopian plans for city designs and such revolve around spreading people out farther and having lots of "green space" and farmland interspersed with living and business districts, but fail on closer examination because it's really hard to be more efficient (cheaper) and more environmentally friendly than having very dense cities yielding, as quickly as possible (i.e. minimizing sprawl and low-density suburbs/exurbs) to farmland. If you can find data supporting the case for lower-density living as cheaper (overall) and more environmentally friendly than denser living, again, I'd be very interested in seeing it. People come up with those spread-out hypothetical cities for a reason—agrarian (even faux-agrarian) living is appealing, if difficult to advocate given the economics of it.
Very cool engineering-wise, but it's not clear to me that subsidies to rural areas like this make sense in the long-term. Like just efficiency-wise, would it not make more sense to have rules that encourage people to live in places where it's easier to provide basic services?
The main problem is that as a whole, we tend to romanticize and privilege rural living. It's generally bad for the environment and economy, and really the latter is why people have already been urbanizing for, well, centuries now.
That as many people are able to live in rural areas now with a modern-ish standard of living is largely because of subsidies from more productive urban areas: just look at state government tax revenues vs spending by county and this is obvious.
I don't hate rural areas, but there's really no reason we should be subsidizing a lifestyle choice that's bad for the environment. At the very least, zoning rules at city and county levels that prevent densification even from landowners who want it on their property should be illegal, there's no good reason for those to exist. Some regional housing and transportation authorities with teeth would also go a long way.
There are all sorts of ramifications to the inefficiency of rural living that developed societies struggle to cope with. That providing, say, high speed internet out there may be too expensive for its own residents to afford may seem like an ignorable problem, until you remember there are kids out there too, and what if the local school wants the students to do things at home that depend on that internet access, which is a reasonable expectation in most of the country these days?
And you think it's justified for others to subsidize the lifestyle of those who live in rural environment?
This is about government funding - it's not a free market solution, it's about the government being honest in how much it is subsidizing different areas. If the total cost was visible perhaps people would say - hey maybe people shouldn't live there.
reply