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.
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For one, family farms have largely been replaced by agribusiness, which tends to be far more economical.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.
Small towns can be fine if they have a compact walkable downtown, and are suitably close to job centers. Rural small towns and old rust belt towns are likely to die slow deaths regardless.
Some small towns definitely still exist, but they're the minority exception instead of 'the way'. That's all I was ever saying. You used to have dozens. It used to just be the way that population centers grew. Now you have a handful of conspicuous exceptions.
And technology has little to do with this change. Plenty of places are still trying to run bus services. Because ubiquitous cars still aren't. But all the intervening challenges have made that near impossible to do (cost)effectively.
Similarly the theatre is gone because once zoning presses you into a car to get there, what's the real difference between 5 minutes to the local downtown or 15 minutes to the multiplex at the mall?
The root cause was largely a socio-political failure. Self-segregation, myopic zoning, a belief in perpetual growth all abetted by enough wealth on the part of the builders to not care about long term efficiency.
It's not about squeezing everyone into a dense city: it's about legalizing or prohibiting the traditional small town form.
My grandfather lived in a small town in Oklahoma that was literally three blocks long. It had a traditional pre-war Main Street of attached commercial buildings with on-street parking, surrounded by detached single-family housing. But when you go there now, the whole town is surrounded by exurban sprawl: all newly constructed businesses are surrounded by a lawn enclosing an oversized on-site parking lot and the business in a detached building. It is nearly impossible to go in and do your shopping by walking from business to business: you have to drive to do every kind of errand.
And this is true of small towns all over: any rural small town with recent construction now has its own exurban zone. It's ridiculous: the closest thing to a prewar Main Street is a strip mall with an onsite parking lot.
To me this is a good sign. Not every small town needs to exist. Historically there were reasons for them - agriculture I guess. But now they often serve no purpose except to house the old people who have trouble leaving. The fact is the world doesn't need as many farmers as it used to so these places are better off left to disappear. It might feel sad if your hometown is lost but it's only physical things whose usefulness has passed.
I don't imagine this sentiment would go down well with most Americans (who I assume live in small towns?) but this is so damn true. There was a small period in history where small-town economies were sustainable (post WW2) but these towns seem to have completely failed to reinvent themselves in light of changing economic conditions. OTOH you have American cities and urban areas innovating like crazy and leading the push towards sustainable living, clean energy etc and creating new markets with lots of jobs.
One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities. So we have a situation where the cities are attracting people from other countries often many oceans away, and the people living in the same state are unwilling to move out of their home towns.
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.
I grew up in a town of 2,000 in rural Illinois. My parents ran a business, until it shut down of course. A lot of people have this idyllic vision of small town life. Everybody knows everybody, you can let your kids walk home from school, happy cows chewing cud in verdant fields.
I will add a caveat to this: I lived in a small town during the decline. The place my parents grew up in was a much more lively, happy place. There were jobs and prosperity, it made sense for them to not leave. My town no longer has a grocery store, has a single restaurant, and I am hard pressed to think of a small business doing well. There are other small towns in the US that I am sure are lovely. I'm just speaking from my own experience.
Unstructured list of thoughts about small town life:
- People are poorly educated and constantly make bad decisions about everything.
- Years of poor decisions and management have buried my town in bad expensive infrastructure.
- Our mayor was an extremely incompetent, unqualified barber.
- The schools are falling apart and the good teachers quickly move on to more lucrative jobs in other areas. The good ones leave. The bad ones stay.
- Picture the Simpsons monorail episode, but replace the ambitious public transit project with a strip mall they can put a buffalo wild wings and a huge parking lot into
- Picture the Simpsons monorail episode, but instead of the town agreeing to build affordable housing, they reject the free government development because, and I was at this meeting, `They don't want the black people from Chicago moving into town.`
- The people... kinda suck.
- Conservatism in small town America exists, it is not some abstract concept. They are racist. They are poorly educated. They think global warming is a hoax.
- There is a special breed of large, swaggering, ignorant, low, angry white men that tend to live in small towns. They exist in cities too, but there are also other people around.
- As the article suggests: The educated leave. The info-wars fans stay.
- Poor diversity. Still know 30 year olds who think it is edgy/cool to slur constantly. Experiencing other cultures breeds empathy. Full stop.
- RAMPANT drug abuse. Alcohol. Meth. Opiates. You name it.
- Mind numbing boredom.
- Just because there is less civilization does not mean it is a beautiful forest.
- Is often a polluted creek people would be happy to replace with a Walmart, or a corn field that stinks of fertilizer for months on end. ( poop )
- There is no culture to interact with.
- Want an education?
- Good luck finding a decent college nearby.
- Want to see a band? Too bad. You will have to drive 4 hours to see anyone.
- Want to start a band?
- Good luck finding a community.
- Good luck finding an audience.
- Good luck finding a mentor.
- Good luck finding a place to perform.
- Who you surround yourself with matters.
- Who are you going to hang out with?
- Who is going to be hanging out and collaborating with your kids? Would you rather it be the smart, cosmopolitan Muhammad, or Cletus the pig-farmer's feral son?
- Kind of obvious, but: What are you going to do for a living?
- There is nobody to network with.
- What are you going to do when you lose your remote gig?
- Personally I would rather have the opportunity to get a local job if remote work goes out of style.
- Small town gossip is a THING.
- People will see your success, covet it, and hate you for it. They will want to knock you down.
Small towns destroyed themselves by deciding to build giant roads, shopping malls, and walmarts instead of maintaining their main street, building parks, and upgrading their schools. You know, enhancing the life of people living in your city, instead of enhancing the lives of the people who drive through it at 60 miles an hour.
Now the malls are empty ( They were always a bad, dumb experiment ). Now all of their pointless expensive roads are crumbling and eating up a massive amount of tax revenue. Walmart pays the community a pittance and funnels all of their wealth to the CEOs.
It stinks people are suffering and losing a way of life, but I feel that much of this pain is self-inflicted. So to small towns: Bye, Felicia.
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!).
That's probably the big takeaway - "many small towns now have no function"; so they will cease to exist, and the only question is how the society will manage the elimination of these small towns. In times/places where it was efficient to live in small villages, people lived in small villages. In times/places where it was efficient to live in large but separate farms/plantations, people lived in such farms. In times/places where it was efficient to live in towns clustered around largish mines or factories, people lived that way - and when times change, people always had to rearrange, re-settle and migrate to wherever started to make sense.
Wishing for those towns to continue existing is not sufficient if there's no economic reason for them to exist at that place in that form and if spare income of the 'wishers' isn't sufficient to sustain the place as a hobby.
Trying to "save" (i.e., prolong the agony of) these towns may be actually harmful to their inhabitants - since staying there isn't a long term option in any case, and the later they move, the harder it will be with more competition from people moving off of other eliminated towns.
To go off on a tangent, I think we, as a nation, need to spread out again. So much of our nation's small towns were built on farm, ranch, oil, mining, etc. labor. And, as those industries got automated out of existence as a source of employment, all of the small towns that were supported by them shrunk/died. Small town America is a disaster these days (and I think why our politics have gotten so ugly; people want someone to blame). They're a meth-addled shell of their former selves.
The most popular cities in the US don't have room for all the people that want to live in them (for a variety of reasons, NIMBYism being a big one). If everyone who could work remotely moved out to smaller towns, we'd revitalize small town America and those folks could buy houses (which is not possible for a lot of people in a place like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Austin, etc.).
But, you're right. I do find the crowded parks surrounding major cities to be a turn-off. There is a point at which I wish there were some more quiet and solitude. Which is why I spend so much time so far away from major cities.
> Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city?
Kind of? A large master-planned community might have thousands of homes and its own commercial district. They've always reminded me a bit of historic small towns.
> If you have a family, small towns can be amazing. Good school districts
Your definition of "small town" must be different than mine, or small towns in your area are a hell of a lot nicer than ours. Or maybe you mean suburban/exurban towns? Those are the only "small towns" with good public schools, around here. Cities (as in, actually in the city proper)? Bad schools. Rural small towns? Bad schools. Smallish cities? Bad schools. There's a belt of good schools in (some of!) the suburban and exurban towns around the major cities, and that's it. Few or none of those towns have the other characteristics you mention, because they're basically bedroom communities for the city they're attached to, with some lame chain retail and fast-food and you go to the city for anything that's actually worth doing.
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.
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.
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