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I don't think anybody is denying that there are impoverished rural areas. They're just pointing out that the picture the article is painting doesn't represent all of rural America as the Times suggests.
But it's a whole lot of it. For every resource extraction place in rural Montana or North Dakota, there are plenty of struggling areas in the Midwest, South, and Appalachia.
By and large, rural Americans are happy where they are, and do not ask for taxpayer subsidized perks such as found in urban areas. As has already been pointed out, rural residents are there by choice.
Whenever you find whining, unhappy rural folks complaining about the lack of amenities, it's a sure thing that they are urban transplants who would like to recreate the city in the country. It doesn't work that way.
A community that has homes you can purchase for $40,000 is a community where wages are low.
For retirees like me with a small pension these communities are great.
For young adults [with stars in their eyes] wanting jobs that pay $100k a year, those kinds of jobs simply do not exist here. They seek high paying jobs in the cities where homes are more commonly priced over $300k.
I am happy to live on a 150 acre farm where my property taxes are ~$800/year. For me, this is ideal.
In my travels, I have seen that areas with high-paying jobs, will also have expensive homes and high taxes. And the opposite is also true. Areas with no high-paying jobs will have low priced homes and lower taxes.
The Cost-Of-Living [home prices and taxes] tracks with the wages.
So you go where the jobs are. Again, this has been the case since forever.
Who is complaining about healthcare? People who think everyone should be able to access a first rate hospital within 10 minutes from their home.
Upstate NY is a low-wage but high property tax area. Taxes seem to approach mortgage payments in many areas.
I live pretty close to the border between Trump-land and Hillary-land (precinct level even, to say nothing of county or state). We have public water and sewer, the realtor called the place "rural", which it is by some (not all) of the varying definitions applied to USDA Rural Development programs.
By vocation and avocation, I travel much more commonly to the rural zones than the urban. There were always differences but in the last 25 years the sprialing apart socially and economically has accelerated.
It has become too easy to profit by division rather than by union. The shift was around 1980.
I think one huge mistake was splitting up the Bell System. In return for the monopoly power, they applied universal service through family sustaining union jobs, and invested significantly in basic and applied research that proved the foundation of our modern society. New services that rolled out to the public after the breakup, such as cellular telephones, had already been invented, and were implemented arguably better in other advanced countries by equivalent monopolies.
Many rural areas had "independent" telephone companies (mostly all consolidated now), with access to Federally supported loans from New Deal-inherited programs to make service equivalent to the then-Bell standard.
Now, we lack universal service, and no one is inventing the next technology, because we threw that away in the interest of short term thinking cannibal capitalism.
One promising blip is the rural electric co-op I pay for another property, just got a grant to implement fiber to the premises, not through the cannibal successor to the local independent telco, but by itself. Nice to have it five years from now, would have been better twenty years ago.
Interesting how many people on this thread live in successful, prosperous rural areas and deny that there are any issues with rural America. Maybe we're not hearing from folks in the struggling areas because they can't afford a computer or don't have Internet access.
I live in a successful, prosperous city and I would never claim that cities like Baltimore or Newark don't have problems. It's sad how many people think that they've got theirs, so tough luck for everyone else.
Rural areas comprise 97% of this country, of course there will be issues. No one said there are no issue in any rural community. The articles and some posters would make it appear a "dilemma" for "rural America" collectively. They didn't site specific towns or communities that are in decline. Rural American communities are not interchangeable.
"Rural America is getting old. The median age is 43, seven years older than city dwellers. Its productivity, defined as output per worker, is lower than urban America’s. Its families have lower incomes. And its share of the population is shrinking: the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena.
Rural communities once captured a greater share of the nation’s prosperity. Jobs and wages in small town America played catch-up with big cities until the mid 1980s. During the economic recovery of 1992 to 1996, 135,000 new businesses were started in small counties, a third of the nation’s total. Employment in small counties shot up by 2.5 million, or 16 percent, twice the pace experienced in counties with million-plus populations.
These days, economic growth bypasses rural economies. In the first four years of the recovery after the 2008 recession, counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses, according to the Economic Innovation Group. By contrast, counties with more than 1 million residents added, altogether, 99,000 firms. By 2017, the largest metropolitan areas had almost 10 percent more jobs than they did at the start of the financial crisis. Rural areas still had fewer."
There is no easy answer to the rural dilemma of a declining local economy.
One good idea is to develop alternative energy in those places. I know of a family living in rural Kansas who has a 23 year old son trained as a windmill technician and he thoroughly enjoys his $60K per year job that includes a new F-150 that he uses to go throughout the county maintaining wind machinery.
I think that would be an awesome idea. Unfortunately those in power do not see Green energy as a source of future jobs, only as a threat to Big Oil, and as a result we will continue to let China and others lead the way to the future while we fall further and further behind.
A community that has homes you can purchase for $40,000 is a community where wages are low.
For retirees like me with a small pension these communities are great.
For young adults [with stars in their eyes] wanting jobs that pay $100k a year, those kinds of jobs simply do not exist here. They seek high paying jobs in the cities where homes are more commonly priced over $300k.
I am happy to live on a 150 acre farm where my property taxes are ~$800/year. For me, this is ideal.
In my travels, I have seen that areas with high-paying jobs, will also have expensive homes and high taxes. And the opposite is also true. Areas with no high-paying jobs will have low priced homes and lower taxes.
The Cost-Of-Living [home prices and taxes] tracks with the wages.
As someone who works in skilled nursing home rehab in a very rural and generally (now, not in the past) a low income rural community, there are drawbacks for the elderly to live there, especially without family nearby. The biggest drawback is the dearth of services. County transportation options for those that no longer drive are abysmal, you might have to choose to get to your doctor's appointment 2 hours early or 30 minutes late. You might sit outside the supermarket waiting for the senior bus for 3 hours. Uber will not be an option much of the time. There may not be a good heart doctor within 45 minutes of you. The county may not have the money or personnel to provide services such as helping you get grab bars around the tub. When it snows, the person who brings you food or helps you shower may not make it for days, as plows are few and far between.
I'm not at all saying it's a mistake for you, but I would not in general recommend an area like that for most older people unless they have family nearby who is willing to help when the time comes.
As someone who works in skilled nursing home rehab in a very rural and generally (now, not in the past) a low income rural community, there are drawbacks for the elderly to live there, especially without family nearby. The biggest drawback is the dearth of services. County transportation options for those that no longer drive are abysmal, you might have to choose to get to your doctor's appointment 2 hours early or 30 minutes late. You might sit outside the supermarket waiting for the senior bus for 3 hours. Uber will not be an option much of the time. There may not be a good heart doctor within 45 minutes of you. The county may not have the money or personnel to provide services such as helping you get grab bars around the tub. When it snows, the person who brings you food or helps you shower may not make it for days, as plows are few and far between.
I'm not at all saying it's a mistake for you, but I would not in general recommend an area like that for most older people unless they have family nearby who is willing to help when the time comes.
Cant that be said for some urban and metro areas.
In my area we have multiple government subsidized transportation services, as well as home health care agencies. On top of that there will be several churches who provide rides and food for the elderly.
I agree though where ever you live it is important to plan for when you are no longer able to care for yourself. Depending on ones individual needs it could be necessary to relocate.
Also, it is a FACT that rural states are almost always net-tax drains on the federal government, while states with more urban areas are nex-tax contributors. Your food keeps us fed and our money/tech keeps your lights on.
The ignorance of your post, which can be so easily disproven, is scary.
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