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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16862977
‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss
There is a deepening sense of fear as population loss accelerates in rural America. The decline of small-town life is expected to be a looming topic in the presidential election.
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America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.
According to a recent Agriculture Department estimate, the rural population did rebound by 0.25 percent from 2020 to 2022 as some families decamped from urban areas during the pandemic.
But demographers say they are still evaluating whether that trend will continue, and if so, where. Pennsylvania has been particularly afflicted. Job losses in the manufacturing and energy industries that began in the 1980s prompted many younger families to relocate to Sun Belt states. The relocations helped fuel population surges in places like Texas and Georgia. But here, two-thirds of the state’s 67 counties have experienced a drop in population in recent years.
You 100% are conflating two entirely different things. Nothing in the article was about people ‘hoarding’ real estate. You literally made up a title that had nothing to do with the article that you posted.
That is entirely false. Where are you getting this from? Small towns are dying because the economy is centralizing on cities. Employers want to be close to infrastructure, and close to potential employees. Coal mining is shutting down–which is a good thing–and that’s decimating mining towns, because the mines, and businesses that supported the mines, were the only game in those towns. Farms are getting consolidated, which means fewer services are needed for farmers in farm towns. Mills that used to make fabric, and factories that used to sew garments, have almost entirely moved overseas as corporations cut their costs, so mill towns no longer have job. The big three auto manufacturers have moved large amounts of manufacturing to Mexico, leaving a lot of towns in Michigan, for instance, with very, very few jobs.
Think this through. If you’re going to open, say, a semi-conductor factory, what do you want? Do you want to be close to interstate highways? Do you want to be close to wastewater treatment? Do you want to be close to railyards and airports? Do you want a large potential pool of skilled and educated labor? Or do you want to be in the middle of rural West Virginia? (Look where the recent semi-conductor facilities are being built; they’re all within relatively easy commuting distance of a major metropolitan area. Not rural areas.)
The kids are moving out of these towns because there are no opportunities; if they want jobs, they have to move. That’s not the fault of people ‘hoarding’ property, that’s the fault of corporations pulling out, and the fault of national trade policy that encouraged corporations to move manufacturing out of the country.
…Yeah, they def. can. The fact that you think it’s impossibly hard to, I dunno, hire an architect and a contractor is pretty amusing. I’ve had to hire both when I lived in a city, because you need to file plans and get permits to do any necessary repairs to an existing structure. The only added step there is that you’re going to have to coordinate with your mortgage broker as well. But if you think that average people can’t hire an architect and a contractor, then you’re implicitly saying that the average person also can’t buy any property in any city that has code enforcement of any kind.
So, no sources. Cool.