‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss

• “younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs”
• “many residents in this deeply Republican town”

gee, I can’t imagine why young people would want to leave such a stagnant regressive environment …

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.

The decline is threefold:

1. Agriculture is getting significantly more efficient. You don't need 300 people do backbreaking labor for 12 hours a day in the beating sun anymore. We have automated threshers.

2. Industries are shifting. We generally moved away from manufacturing and an extraction-based economy. (Though the former is recovering, thanks to Biden's awesome investment plan)

3. jobs are moving to cities, where there are more schools, hospitals, high paying jobs, and may be more resilient to climate change.

Personally, I'd never ever consider moving anywhere rural for the aforementioned reasons, but also because rural americans are against my type family, and I don't care to be the queer pioneer family for them to realize we aren't so bad. I also never want to drive a car for a half hour+ for basic supplies or to see friends. It's too lonely. We have rail and ebikes here. I can get to the store or a friend's in less than 10 minutes.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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 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.

The 1% can make their own wage slaves

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).

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.

Same here in Australia? I'm 57, I'm one of the youngest around, dude I bought the place off was 87 and moving into a retirement hone.

I wonder if climate change will drive people back to places like Pennsylvanian? Good water, forested, temperate.

Those rural people should start throwing cornstarch paint on stuff to raise awareness of this important issue