People in the United States can choose to live in very rural and sparsely populated areas, far more remote than most OECD countries.
It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries.
We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.
Some people will be really mad about this comment, but it's absolutely correct.
Broadly speaking, very rural living is generally a lifestyle choice. Yes, not everyone can afford to live in big cities, but there are typically small towns in the general vicinity of rural areas that are quite affordable.
Of course, there are exceptions where you truly need the space, like if you're a farmer, but that's not most people in rural areas.
Edit: to be clear, I don't think it's fundamentally wrong or anything for people to choose the rural lifestyle, I just don't think we should be heavily subsidizing it.
'Median total farm household income has exceeded the median U.S. household income in every year since 1998'
'In 2024, median farm operator household income exceeded median U.S. household income by 22.7 percent'
'In 2024, the median U.S. farm household had $1.6 million in wealth'
'In 2024, fewer than 3 percent of all farm households had wealth levels that were lower than the estimated U.S. median household level and over 97 percent had wealth levels higher than the U.S. median'
Buddy, many of the people who are being served by Starlink are by no means "very" rural at all. If you get into "lives in a shack in the mountains", then sure I agree, but a HUGE number of people are barely outside of an immediate service area and have no access for one dumb reason or another. This is a demonstration of the failure of our country to do simple, pragmatic things that would benefit our citizens' lives. The "fix" was for some private company to launch things into orbit. It's an expensive fix to a simple problem.
Generally speaking, private companies want to make money by getting customers. Obviously there can be edge cases, but if there's profit to be made by hooking people up, they'll want to do it, and if private companies don't want to get more customers, you have to ask yourself some hard questions about why.
I think we both know what's usually happening: people in an area who, as a whole, are rural enough and poor enough that the economics don't really pen out well. And I'm sure said corporations would be happy for the local government to pay the cost of running those lines out -- if that's not happening, ask yourself why those local governments don't want to pay for it either.
Now if you want to say, "well I don't care if it scales badly, the federal government should just subsidize it until it works", that's your prerogative. But another option would be to encourage zoning and similar rules that impact how people live to change towards better scaling of infrastructure and services, so that spending on these kinds of things is more sustainable and fair.
people here don't understand how large USA is -- connecting every corner with copper/fiber, with all the intermediary networking devices means tax money...
A better option would be to eliminate corporate income tax entirely, and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Corporations waste a lot of resources on financial engineering to minimize tax liability, and that's a pure deadweight loss for the economy as a whole.
My parents have Starlink. They live in an area surrounded by dairy farms. It's half a mile between mailboxes. The nearest town is 7 miles away (though only 3 as the crow flies - lots of hills between here and there).
None of the neighbors have cable TV. You've got to either go into town or t'wards the highway 7 miles the other direction).
Three years ago, the utility ran natural gas that far out. Prior to that, it was propane tanks (for the past 50 years) for heat in the winter.
The state capital is 30 miles away... so its not that far away from civilization (this isn't Montana or the north woods of the upper midwest).
When nano-cells came out for cellphones my father and I were the first in line at the store (that was 2010 if I recall correctly). It let the house be able to use a cell phone in the yard - before that it was the landline (and it was DSL for the nano-cell backhaul).
In 2020 when school was remote, their grandkids were there. Prior to Starlink my father got a Firewalla (for network load balancing) and got a second DSL link (it was barely qualifying as high speed internet) so that it could support two zoom calls simultaneously (don't stream music or watch YouTube while the kids are on Zoom School).
5G cell coverage sounds great... but those hills I mentioned earlier? You can get cell phone coverage at the house without the nano-cell... if you get a ladder out and climb up to the top of the roof.
So yes, to support the person I'm replying to - there are a lot of people who are 30 minutes outside of a city of appreciable size and are without wired high speed internet.
Generally agree. I live in a location that had (still has?) PSTN service, electricity, and natural gas services, but never got any kind of broadband besides the network I paid for and deployed myself, and subsequently of course StarLink.
I think the issue isn't so much that people are demanding internet service in
random places, more they're expecting internet service in the places you get all the other regular services.
I don’t think we should subsidize internet, but your framing here rubs me the wrong way. People in these rural areas usually live among family and have lived there for generations, reducing this to a choice feels very elitist. People aren’t “choosing” to not pack up their entire lives and move to a city or town.
We shouldn't subsidize internet, it should be provided. The internet is necessary to participate in modern society, and to only provide it to people who can afford it is what's actually elitist.
what is the point of a society that doesen't have common utilities? and where does one draw the line at what is necessary for a decent life in a modern society?
I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"
The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"
Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.
> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.
Not sure what you mean exactly. In the jurisdictions I have experience the utility is legally obligated to provide service to any residence within the territory. That resident can then decide to use 100% solar with batteries and pay us nothing, or use solar during the day and rely on the grid at night, or in our case we had net metering so resident were able to treat the utility as a free battery, producing excess kWh during the day and drawing it back at night, paying only the difference in total draw (or receiving a credit even).
I have not worked in water/sewage, but the characteristics are quite different compared to electricity--electricity cannot be stored, it needs to be sent directly from the power plant to the consumer at the exact moment it is consumed, but on the other hand electricity can be produced more or less on demand with the quantity limited only by your willingness to pay. Water is finite, and is simply being managed by the utility rather than created on demand. Someone collecting rainwater is still impacting the local water system and depending on the environment this still needs to be managed by someone.
> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.
But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?
Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.
Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.
> But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?
They can be in a small town in the region, which is where the school and liquor store probably already are.
I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart.
I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.
They're not 'the poor' though. If you own a $20 million of land why is everyone rich and poor in the city paying a dollar to fund your faster internet?
Small family farms are defined as those with annual gross cash farm income (GCFI) of less than $350,000; in 2011, these accounted for 90 percent of all US farms. Because low net farm incomes tend to predominate on such farms, most farm families on small family farms are extremely dependent on off-farm income. Small family farms in which the principal operator was mostly employed off-farm accounted for 42 percent of all farms and 15 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $788. Retirement family farms were small farms accounting for 16 percent of all farms and 7 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $5,002.
Estimated median total income for farm households increased in 2024 relative to 2023. Median income from farming decreased while median off-farm income increased in 2024 relative to 2023. At the median, household income from farming was -$1,830 in 2024. Given the broad USDA definition of a farm (see glossary), many small farms are not profitable even in the best farm income years. Median off-farm income in 2024 was $86,900, while the median total household income was $102,748.
The 80 year old house on a woodlot that a teacher is living in should be closed so they can buy a more expensive one in town?
This isn't (all) new construction of people deciding to cast off the shackles of urban living and shoveling sidewalks and deciding to move out into the more rural parts of the state... but rather people living in houses that are 50 or more years old that their parents passed on to them.
These are houses that were built in the early to mid part of the previous century that had two wires running - one for power, one for phone.
The idea that because you are not-farmer you should live in a city seems quite prescriptive.
People are living in rural parts of the country not because of the convinces of urban living, but rather because that's where they can afford to buy an old house and even with the additional utility costs (buying propane, septic, well) it is still less expensive than trying to buy a new construction house in the suburbs.
>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days.
Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.
The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing.
So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.
>The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises
Over three quarters of all residential land in Seattle is zoned single family and the population density of the city is less than a third that of NYC. The geography is not the hard constraint in this city.
Subsidizing down payments doesn't do anything to improve housing availability or affordability in the long run. It just artificially inflates real estate values and acts as a wealth transfer from taxpayers to property owners.
You offer cities with aggressive anti-development regulations, like max height restrictions, and then suggest things would be the same if they instead had endless high-rises?
Sounds like you've found an infinite-value hack: let developers build infinite housing yet prices stay the same.
How many of those "random policy ideas into the void" were to lift regulations to allow people to build housing? Which sounds a hell of a lot simpler than figuring out how to make everyone wealthier without proportional increases in market prices.
i'm realizing i don't have a great knowledge base on like,, exactly how many people live in a suburb but would rather live in a city and vice versa. anything you can point me towards? you can make sure the whole state has access to the basic living amenities required to, say, do remote work effectively, but my gut tells me that a significant number of people are drawn to urban areas for the types of amenities only possible with higher population density
Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result.
There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.
If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
Well, we'd stop having to spend so much taxes on redistributive efforts, again, like subsidized internet. It's up to voters and politicians to actually change the tax rate to save the money. It'd reduce government debt at least.
Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.
Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.
Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable.
Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc
Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.
Moving is incredibly expensive. First+Last month rent up-front, plus a deposit equal to one month rent up-front. That could total around $10,000 up-front costs if you are targeting a major city.
Conversely, having quality utilities in smaller communities could incentivize the building up of those areas and they would become less rural.
lol I paid 17K for NYC - two months rent, extra month for being foreign, 2K since they removed blinds since they showed me the apartment and everyone in NYC could see into my house.
Countries subsidize rural living because it enforces their control over the frontier.
The United States is difficult to invade because of the oceans surrounding it and the many people with guns in the interior that'll take shots at armies.
If you put everyone in a few cities on the coast, the USA becomes easier to invade.
I can't find any source suggesting this was actually a thing in the 30s and 40s. All I can find is the Zimmerman telegram from a hundred years ago which the Mexicans weren't exactly enthusiastic about.
In any case, I doubt there is any realistic threat of a Mexican invasion beyond fantasizing from political fringes.
Quite the contrary: an empty countryside would make invasions harder because there would be no infrastructure: no roads, no bridges, no tunnels, no electricity, no water supply, no opportunities for shelter. Everything would have to be shipped from outside or built by combat engineers, putting an immense strain on logistics and slowing operations to a crawl.
It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days. Starlink and 5G are great for this, as is solar energy and batteries.
We already subsidize sprawl’s expensive-per-person infrastructure with tax revenue from dense cities. As a country we need to make a decision about which choices we want to encourage and discourage.