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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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

• “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 …

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!

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.