Why dont more people live in smaller communities , appart from economic opportunity (WFH is making it possible if not prefferable too)

Remember when American tax payers gave billions to telecoms to install fiber in rural America?

Don't worry they conveniently forgot too.

That plus other services like rural hospitals and education are huge drawbacks to living in most of rural America.

Also a bunch of other issues with small town living like lack of privacy/anonymity, entertainment, restaurants, government services, etc... And these problems get more severe the smaller the community.

But people really did spread out to smaller towns during COVID. Property values went crazy in a lot of small towns around me.
- I live in a small mountain town, and property values went apeshit. Like a house/cabin that was $150-250k is now $4-500k. It's insane.
  
  Privacy and anonymity is definitely still a thing as long as you keep you business to yourself, because as I'm guessing you're alluding to, people are pretty chatty as it is and a smaller population makes it more difficult. It also helps to not be an asshole and give people even more to talk about, especially when most everyone knows each other.

European

As an American, it's because there's nothing out there. We have SO much land. A small town means you have to drive everywhere. It means the local grocery is 30 min away. It also means 300 people in the town, one library (maybe), but at least three churches. Very much not my vibe :-)

Not everywhere, obviously, but it's a thing.

I live in a city of over 100,000 people and my grocery store is 25 minutes away. About an hour if I walk.

I grew up in a small town and had two grocery stores within 8 minutes. Everything was a lot more expensive and there was less selection.

Moved because of the lack of services (no hospital, volunteer FD and ambulance, no high school, no college nearby, no taxi service, no bus service, everything shut down at 6 PM).
- Out of curiosity, what region are you in? I live in a city of ~80,000 in the northeastish US and I'm not even sure it's possible to be more than 5 or 10 minutes from a grocery store here.
- I feel you on that.
  
  I live in a town of about 71,000 The nearest grocery store which is a little bit more expensive is seven minutes by car. The other one that’s a little bit less expensive is about 15 to 20 minutes by car.

Poor infrastructure in many of these communities, and no way to get to larger towns and cities without a car. So you're stuck with crappy chain stores and terrible quality food, harming your health. And it's boring, because it can't support many kinds of entertainment.
Smaller communities tend to skew towards conservatives, and there's little way to escape from it (due to the distances and the lack of high speed rail). So expect more religiosity, more discrimination, and politicians that are even shittier than the average.

Huh , i forgor about americans and their shit-frastracture ... im from europe and our villages/small towns are dying even tho most of what you said isnt true for us.

Idk whats it about , as most people my age (late 20s early 30s) want to live in a smaller town nearby but noone is moving there just staying in the big cities.
- I think you need to specify your European country, because small French villages have awful infrastructure while their cities have amazing infrastructure.
  
  But even here in the Netherlands, if I'd live in a village and I wanted to go to another village further away I'd need to take the train to the nearest city and then take another train to said village. This often takes much longer than by car. Also, while basic shopping needs like a supermarket, greengrocer and some basic repair shops might be there (maybe just the supermarket) you don't have access to... Anything else really, and need to take the car there, too. Sadly, necessary non-commercial facilities like hospitals and higher education are also missing from most villages here.
- Well, I lived in such conditions most of my adulthood before having a kid to care for, and it was possible precisely because it was just me. Either it was a small town not even close to a big city, or it was a small town at the outskirts of a big city, some 20-30km away. I loved it. Still do.
  
  But it’s so hard to uproot once you have all the other stuff like not only your own job, but also your partner’s. And kid’s school or daycare or whatever. And then having to work out the bus routes for the small humans and figure whether or not it’d be plausible for them to adjust to that and not get burned out or lost or confused or whatever.
  
  And once you need more space, it’s much harder to find places to rent in the small towns. Mostly for sale, if it’s beyond two bedrooms. And in that case it’s much more complicated since you need to go to the effort of getting the place evaluated, arranging the loans and finances so you can pull it off, and that’s a big decision since it’ll probably lock you in there for quite some while, because small towns don’t move houses fast if you decide to go, so you could be looking at years before you get the sale done and another mortgage.
  
  It’s just so hard. Once you are in the city, it’s hard to leave. And the more you root in the city, the harder it gets.
  
  I hate it. I hate the city. I hate most about it.
  
  But I love my family and would suffer in a city until my death if that’s what it takes to keep it together.
  
  But as a positive anecdote, in my life prior to rooting down, as a younger and more adventurous human, I found that maintaining a community and a good group of friends even somewhat far away from the rest of them is easy and most importantly, comes easy. Its natural. I never found community a problem, because I always had a few groups of friends and it was always enough for us to touch ground together only monthly or every other month, so our location wasn’t really a concern. Most of us lived apart anyway. And the actual day-to-day sense of community came from work or uni or that kind of thing. I was never alone, though I lived blissfully far from most everyone.
  
  So the only thing that really makes it difficult is trying to find a way and a good timing for not only one, but three+ people to move at once with all of them being happy with it. That’s a puzzle I’ve found near impossible to crack.
  
  If we had a lot of money saved or good enough jobs to get a nest egg going, the problems likely wouldn’t matter and could very easily be worked around. But alas, we are just lower middle class, and while we are well enough off, moving is a completely life changing and paradigm shifting thing. It’s not something to choose lightly.
  
  Maybe that plays a part within your group of acquaintances too? My work is even WFM and my partner could likely commute easily from most of the options we have within 100km. So technically we have a lot going for it. Should be easier.
  
  But it’s not. Life is complex.
  
  Edit: For context, I’m in Europe too.

I don't drive. Where I live, you can really only "not drive" in cities. And even then, it can be hard at times.

At the same time, I live within reasonable commuting distance of multiple friends and family members. I can walk to a few of them. I don't need to be closer to my community.

I might want to retire someplace quieter, but I like being able to hop on a train or a bus to get to somewhere fun, or to be able to walk across the street to a store if I need something. Heck, I can even easily get takeout if I don't feel like cooking -- I don't even need delivery.

I can even easily get takeout if I don’t feel like

And I’ll take that up a notch. I currently live in a small city outside a large one, and I can walk to get takeout, from

American diner

Greek kebabs

Pakistani kebabs

several Indian restaurants

several Chinese restaurants

several Mexican restaurants

at least one Salvadoran

at least one Chilean

some sort of African thing I haven’t yet tried

….. and so many more

Our new family activity for pandemic was to walk for takeout from the new Punjabi restaurant, and eat dinner on a bench in the town common….. try that in your small town
- When we lived in a bigger place, we got used to going down to the massive Asian supermarket, the French bakery, the Balkan place down the street, the dirt-cheap Salvadorean/pupusa place. I admit I did start taking it for granted, then moved away and remembered, "Oh, right, they don't have cool stuff everywhere."

Usually those places are lacking (unfortunately). Food deserts, lack of infrastructure, sometimes even poor medical facilities. Also, locations like these tend to be more conservative, and conservatives are not always the most friendly. I personally did move to a smaller area, but I don't have a family/kids so I'm able to be more indifferent towards the lack of resources. (I also moved to the hood 👀)

Related meme:

Omfg , im stealing that meme for future use

I'm weird as fuck. Other people who are as weird as fuck as me are possible to be found, but a small community makes it unlikely if not impossible. People as weird as me can only really be found in a big enough place with enough people.

And yeah, there's also just much more to do than in a smaller town. Taking 30-45 minutes to arrive at something you wanna do is a significant hurdle compared to 5-10 minutes.

The reasons I moved from a town of 3,500 people to around 100,000 people after 2 years are

More dating options: most of the women in the small town I lived in were already in relationships or weren't compatible. I started dating my wife a few months after I moved

Better access to services: if I wanted to get groceries on Sunday I would have to drive 30 minutes to the next town over and banks would be closed before 5. The local restaurants were good but there were only a few.

Better access to fun stuff: I train jiu jitsu and the closest gym to where I lived was a 50 minute drive 1 way and the closest 10+ mile bike trail was 30 minutes away. I would stay at my friend's house overnight or get a hotel so I could have a decent night on the town since it was also 50 minutes away from home

There are opportunities to have fun and build a happy life in small towns but if you have niche interests then it can be a little lonely. Plus some of the activities are private so it can be harder to find them and access them.

The upside was the people there are really nice and it was really cheap to live there so I paid off a ton of debt.

I've personally been thriving since moving to a big city. I never want to go back to the middle of nowhere. I enjoy urban exploration, I love the diversity of business and people, and I love the sheer amount of community that exists. I love that there's always new things to find. That just doesn't exist outside of cities.

The majority of jobs simply don't allow any sort of WFH: if it involves creating or transforming something, people have to be physically manning the tools. Healthcare can't be WFH, education sucks when it's fully online.

Smaller communities are great for peace and quiet, but terrible when you need anything they don't have (or don't have in decent quality), like jobs, transportation, healthcare and education. If you happen to be "socially weird", you have to adapt and "unweird" yourself

There is not enough stimulation in a small community. In the US, they are also usually full of hateful/ignorant people.

My neighborhood is my "small community". I don't need to leave the city for that.

Interesting .. usually where i live, neighbourhoods in big cities arent well connected so i never saw it that way i guess ?

More power to people who can organise like that !

Australian here; I much prefer living away from cities. I like having a big house on a big block with lots of nature and as few other people around me as possible.

The catch is while the housing and land is wayyyy cheaper, other stuff is more expensive and inconvenient. The biggest thing people don’t consider is trades people; you’ll have plumbers, sparkies etc just refuse to even come out when they find out you’re more than half an hour away from civilisation, and if they do come out they charge for the travel.

I have found the opposite in rural Michigan (northern US). My wife's family has a vacation home, and skilled tradespeople are slightly cheaper around there. The place is more than an hour from any large towns, but 30 minutes from several small towns.

Maybe population is distributed differently here due to the way infrastructure is funded?
Semi-unrelated: I I love Aussie slang.

Block for lot? Sparky for electrician? Whippersnipper for weedeater? Barbie for BBQ? Cunt for everything else?

Fucking YES lol I want more

Infintevalence pretty much nailed it

We're country as fuck up here. Not a small town any more, but still more rural than suburban.

While we're in driving distance of a good hospital, it's a drive, not something in town. There's just not enough people to keep a hospital in use often enough to make it reasonable in a capitalist system at all, but even in an ideal, post scarcity system, the resources to build and run hospitals are going to be best located where the most people can benefit from it.

And pretty much everything scales the same. Why locate a big university in a town with maybe 10k people if you include outlying areas? To support that kind of endeavor, you'd need more people to do the work, so the town would get bigger because of the large undertaking.

It's a balance. If you want to have bigger centralized services, you need more people to make it work. And, if you don't already have the population, attracting bigger things is harder, so the chances of things like public transit, resource intensive facilities, exotic supplies/foods coming there are lower.

It results in people that value the benefits of a smaller population center over the usual benefits of a bigger center being the only ones that'll move out

My mom came from a small town and said she'd never raise a kid in a small town - her cousins, all save one, were in jail or pregnant before they graduated high school. Because there was literally nothing to do.

I like having restaurants, a good library system, concerts, bars, not needing to drive to get anything. I like living in a mid-sized city, but if I couldn't, would go bigger not smaller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization?wprov=sfla1

See "Causes" and the link to rural flight.

The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.

Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that's where the business is, because they're the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn't have the money or infrastructure to go where they'd like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.

The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.

You're being incredibly over dramatic. Plenty of businesses thrive off of mostly middle or lower income customers.

Cities are just better. Rich or no rich, larger amounts of people means more restaurants and things to do.
- I don't think I am being over dramatic, I'd love to know what specifically you think isn't grounded or reasonable.
  
  Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I'm talking about a slope here - a velocity. "Increasingly..." means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we'll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there's 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.
  
  More restaurants in cities because there's more money in cities because there's more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It's all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.
  
  Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can't build that infrastructure because... of a lot of reasons, but I'd argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it's only getting worse.
  
  It's why populism is so popular right now. It's why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It's why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it's why if they're not careful they'll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.
  
  Wealth inequality is everything.

TL;DR: capitalism.

I’ve put some thought into this and I don’t have a good answer other than because of how society is designed to keep us from doing it now.

Evolutionarily speaking, we are designed to thrive in smaller communities. It’s only in the more recent part of humanity that we seem to have moved away from that. I mean, there were still cities a long time ago, but within them were what could be thought of as smaller communities.

I myself am of European descent, but currently live in a place where there is a thriving native community and realizing that I sometimes have envy of some of their ways of life is what got me thinking.

For instance, in western society becoming elderly is almost seen as a problem, like a burden that needs to be “dealt” with. For them it is a station of respect and reverence. If an Elder walks down the street, they are taught to show respect and pay heed to their wisdom and guidance. If the rest of us are lucky, we can get a seniors discount at select stores by declaring they we are among the needy.

I’ve even went as far as researching communal living, intentional communities and cooperative housing, but I keep chickening out when it comes time to pull anything into action.

The idea of finding 4-6 like-minded families to share resources with and use our individual talents and skills to help each other really appeals to me. It makes sense to build resilience against harder times.

But to answer your question, smaller communities helping each other is against the capitalist ideal and is/will be thwarted at any scale by corporations and corporate influenced governments alike at every turn. So I guess that’s the most likely reason.

Be careful. Having ownership of your resources allows you to take your stuff, or sell it, and try something else somwhere else. If all the resources are communal, it is harder to escape if the things go south. One of the reasons why is it difficult to leave certain kind of cults.
- Absolutely, which is why cooperative corporate structure appealed to me. Everyone has there same stake in it and still maintains their own separate lives. Only things that are agreed upon as shareable would be shared.
  
  Like bulk food, equipment, etc.
Seniors who show they deserve respect should be given it. But plenty do not.
- I hear you and agree, but part of me wonders if that is solely because they were always nasty people, or they are actually reacting to the awful way they get treated.
  
  They are already probably dealing with failing health, burying most of their friends, not understanding most of what is going on in the world, feeling left behind, etc.
  
  In their shoes I’m not sure if I could be very cheerful myself. Maybe I’ll get the opportunity to find out and hopefully I’ll not be one of the ones you mention, but who knows.
  
  Most of us are tired from all the crap of the world already, imagine 30-40 more years of that on top of the things I just mentioned.

I don't know, the whole being completely surrounded by backwards fucking hicks who hate my mere existence for living my life as who I actually am might have something to do with it.

Maybe, just maybe, I like living near people who accept me for who I am and most of those people are in cities while the rural areas are filled with hate filled fucking jackasses who couldn't manage to fucking read Green Eggs & Ham even if they had a gun pointed at their head with the threat of death if they failed.

The career opportunities for my partner's career are basically only available in this region of our country.

It would probably help to define the terms you're using, as there are many ways to interpret "big place", "small place", "many people", etc.

I don't even know if your starting point is accurate.

As an American (not that it’s particularly unique from Europe) living in a city feels much better because I’m not completely tied to my car. Living in suburbs and rural areas makes it far less tenable to walk or bike anywhere. Cities are the only place with any sort of public transportation or even pedestrian infrastructure that is remotely walker-friendly. Walking is not only more physically healthy it also makes me feel better emotionally

WFH isn't available to most people. To have a WFH opportunity, you have to have a job that's almost entirely done on a computer with no need to be on-site almost ever. That's just not a reality for most people. For some? Sure. But even most people with jobs that are largely WFH still have to go into their office once or twice a week.

I remember some guy, anthropologist or something like that, was trying to figure out why it was that people in cities made on average more money than people in small towns or rural areas, until it hit him: That's why cities exist in the first place.

Because they don't know how to do a spreadsheet for household budget.

Once you see the numbers all laid out, living in a small town is usually better in NA.

If you measure your life only in dollars, maybe. Maybe.
Only certain things cost more in cities like housing. Other things are basically the same price, especially with online options. You get paid more, which means your 401k match is more money. There's more opportunities in cities and services like schools are generally much better because of better funding.

Yeah, if you're childfree and wfh, it's probably worth it to move to a lcol area. But there are a lot of things to consider.
- Average income is about 60k, I can't see a way past the triple cost for housing to make up for the comparatively tiny hit you'll take in income.
  
  To live in a city, you're looking at 4k a month for a 3bdrm. Small town you're looking at 1.5k. The 2.5k difference is 30k more per year for housing.
  
  I just don't see a 60k person making 90k just to live in a city.

I live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It's great here.

I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don't need a car.
there's a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that's your jam.
I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
more people means it's easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There's everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn't your vibe.
stuff is open later.

Some of the things people imagine about cities aren't really true

it's not constant noise
I typically can't hear my neighbors
people don't typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
it's not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it's always times Square on NYE, but it's just not.

While you're not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

Some people want "more space" but I don't really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

If I had kids, I wouldn't want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can't get anywhere on your own. Don't like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that's your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn't want to.