Drive through rural America and see how many underpopulated small towns there are. Shuttered businesses for lack of customers. Abandoned buildings. These places need people.
Funny thing is that even the immigrants are smart enough to know the shouldn’t settle in these places because they’re going down the toilet. But the locals? We’re being ignored! Save our useless town with no economic prospects, no educated workforce, and no infrastructure to support anything worthwhile! No, of course we won’t move!. …while they proceed to vote against any social policy that might help them or their future generations out of their trap.
For comparison, here in Brazil I lived most of my life in a town with ~35K residents and it was already considered a small rural town. Some of my family lives in a neighboring town with ~11K residents, and even in my hometown people joke about how small it is, and that there’s basically nothing going on there. 1288 of towns in Brazil have less than 5K residents, or about 23.1%, and there are no towns with less than 500 residents. Meanwhile in the US 76% of towns have less than 5K residents.
Again, it’s just kind of wild to me. I remember playing (reading?) the Echo VN and thinking “Man, a dying town with only 50 people? That doesn’t sound realistic,” but apparently that’s way more common than I thought.
Drive through rural America and see how many underpopulated small towns there are. Shuttered businesses for lack of customers. Abandoned buildings. These places need people.
Funny thing is that even the immigrants are smart enough to know the shouldn’t settle in these places because they’re going down the toilet. But the locals? We’re being ignored! Save our useless town with no economic prospects, no educated workforce, and no infrastructure to support anything worthwhile! No, of course we won’t move!. …while they proceed to vote against any social policy that might help them or their future generations out of their trap.
It’s kind of wild to me how many really small towns there are in the US. About 32% of towns in the U.S. have less than 500 residents.
For comparison, here in Brazil I lived most of my life in a town with ~35K residents and it was already considered a small rural town. Some of my family lives in a neighboring town with ~11K residents, and even in my hometown people joke about how small it is, and that there’s basically nothing going on there. 1288 of towns in Brazil have less than 5K residents, or about 23.1%, and there are no towns with less than 500 residents. Meanwhile in the US 76% of towns have less than 5K residents.
Again, it’s just kind of wild to me. I remember playing (reading?) the Echo VN and thinking “Man, a dying town with only 50 people? That doesn’t sound realistic,” but apparently that’s way more common than I thought.