my dog :(

They hated him because he told the truth

Years ago, I went with a girlfriend to visit her relatives who lived in several rural Minnesota towns. As we drove down the highway, we saw lots of little towns with 3 and even 2 digit populations. Some towns were one intersection, sometimes without even a traffic light, but they'd always seem to have a post office, and a couple of bars.

In one low 2 digit small town, her relatives made up nearly half the population, and she took me through several empty houses and buildings that used to belong to relatives, all unlocked. One was an old abandoned forge where some great-great relative had been a blacksmith long ago. We stayed in a family-owned house that was fully furnished, but nobody lived there since an uncle passed away several years before.

That trip was about 50 years ago (!), and many of those towns were already on a long decline back then. Surely many of them have collapsed since then, and emptied out.

if you build a city in a DESERT or arid regions, one should be cognizant of the expectation of water shortage.

Fuck, I hadn’t heard about Salem’s water concerns.

Not a big guardian fan but I just saw an article about such towns pertaining to Trump cutting the funding that was earmarked to help those kinds of towns transition away from coal.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/29/trump-coal-country

A lot of the small towns in Nebraska and Kansas will be ghost towns when the few boomers that still live there pass away as all of the younger generations have already moved away.

is that why they are redistricting/gerrymandering so hard in recent years too? it make sense.

I read something that villages in the alps are looking for new residents. But most of them are bankers or other people with office jobs, and they are like: no, we don:t need better wifi, you guys are useless in the real world.

It happens everywhere.

Current structures favour moving to cities. Farming and mining (which are the biggest job sectors that require people living in rural areas) are getting more and more automated, which means that there are fewer and fewer jobs in these fields. At the same time, huge, automated businesses win financially against smaller businesses operated with manual labour, so the small farmers are dieing off as well.

Manual jobs are often seasonal (e.g. picking fruit), and they are filled with seasonal foreign workers who don't live in the rural areas either.

WIth fewer people living in rural areas other jobs (e.g. factories) also move to the cities, further removing rural jobs.

All of that push more people to move to cities and so on.

The impending demographic change accelerates that trend too.

not if they're abandoned because they don't have accessible clean water, affordable power etc....

people aren't walking away from livable places.

The problem repeatedly seems to come down to a decision of "cost now, money saved later" versus "money saved now, much bigger cost later".

The choice always seems to be the latter

You willing to bet a city on that?