Yeah, chiefly the fact that I don’t have to deal with urban neighbors. And my Wi-Fi is fine, btw.
New Hampshire has both high per capita income and the third highest average connection speed in the country, so I’m pretty sure that crappy internet service in other rural areas had more to do with the relative wealth of those areas than the fact that they’re rural.
If ‘all the talk’ extends to the opinion that the EC/Senate set up is ‘unfair’ OK, if that’s stated as if some fact, I don’t agree. It’s an opinion, that I don’t share (as a resident of a fairly high population state).
Anyway I think you might have a point about ‘have to live it’ with some work/lifestyles more dramatically different than working in a white collar cube farm, a store, being an in-home service provider, etc. But as others noted, it’s limited because not a very high % of people even in ‘red’ areas do those very different things for a living. Most work in relatively similar jobs to most people in ‘blue’ areas (not the same mix of jobs, but ones where the general experience is more mutually understandable).
More people in urban areas in the US tend to originally come from rural areas than vice versa, although in that case the definitions can be become a little circular. Places outside major metro areas where lots of major metro people have moved tend to become politically more like the places they left. Seldom recently in the US has rural migration to major metro’s been enough to change them politically/socially (though it once was, and often is in developing countries).
But mainly most people are in their own bubbles, not that well informed, often not that curious, often not that bright, in somewhat descending order of prevalence but still accurate in general IME. So they don’t understand other people’s different situations well. And now US disunity has progressed to the common view on both sides of moral superiority for people on ‘their side’.
I think the OP needs to better define urban and rural. Gotham City and Mayberry I can see. What about Des Moines? Wichita? Fresno? Orlando? The thing I always see is a farming community or someone outside of 20 people/sq mile density vs the inner city. Aren’t enough people to sway a vote. Most of the voters need to be in some time of higher density living arrangement. What is the level that transitions from rural to urban? Madison? Kansas City? Is Anaheim rural compared to LA?
Yeah. There have been cites that the US is 80% urban, but if you asked around…
In my case, Kentucky has Louisville (pop 770k) and Lexington (320k) as its biggest cities. Though Lexington is about the size of a Chicago suburb, it’s considered very urban by both its inhabitants and folks in the surrounding rural area.
Moving to an area where the closest town is about 10k people, I regularly meet people that see Lexington as a hive of scum and villainy and claim to know all about big city life with its freaks and weirdos based on the city’s faint resemblance to stuff they’ve seen on tv.
Living in Chicago, people were often surprised by rural life experiences I talked about (that I grew up fishing and hunting, that I’d worked on a farm most summers) because they didn’t have many assumptions about it, or think about it much at all. At most, I’d say the urban perspective on rural life was out-dated, based on old media portrayals like Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show.
That 80% urban number struck me as too high- so I went looking around. And it appears that the reason the number is so high is that places are counted as “urban” that most people wouldn’t consider urban at all - places with as few as 2500residents can be considered urban as long as the population is dense enough. I’m sure the population density in Bellevue, Iowa met the Census Bureau’s standards in 2010*, but as far as I can tell, it’s a small town surrounded by rural areas- which is not generally what I think of when I hear “urban”. It also strikes me that “urban” populations in this type of small town probably are on the same side of any divide as their rural neighbors half-a-mile down the road. After all, it’s not particularly uncommon for the non-farmers who live in the country to work in town.
- It doesn’t anymore but it’s still listed as 100% urban until the next census.
I think there’s an assumption on the part of a lot of non big city dwellers that “city life” is really more of the super high density urban area like say… the Bronx or San Francisco, instead of being much more low density like most cities.
Truly. Same planet, different worlds.
I think there is another factor involved here that I have not seen covered.
What percentage of people living in large urban areas (like Dallas, Chicago, New York), own their own business? A very wild guess on my side would be less than 5%, maybe even less. Pick a smaller city (not a suburb to a larger city), what does the % go up to? 10%? Now pick a small farming community. Does your business owner go higher? Maybe 30%?
People working for a business have a different mindset and different concerns than the person that owns that business.
If the EPA tells a farmer he has to stop cropping a 5 acre field because, 2 weeks out of the year it has standing water, the urban dweller may say, “Yes, we need to protect our wetlands!” From the farmers point of view, you may have just removed a sizable percent of his most productive land from his income stream. Vernal pools (pools that form in the spring rains but are dry at other times of the year) are often considered wetlands from an EPA point of view.
Neither side understands, that’s most of the problem.
Kind of like how people in many countries are familiar with the mis-explanations of American police procedures from so many American cop shows… but how many of you have watched Los hombres de Paco? The group that’s most likely to be in the media is misunderstood by the other one; the issues of this other one may not even be in the radar for the first. Or rather, the way the issues of this other one differ from those same issues for the first: “school” is an issue for any parent, but the logistical, districting and financing issues are very different in different areas.
The upside is the 30 miles would take 30 minutes on rural roads and might be quite scenic and relaxing. That 30 minutes would be a predictable time pretty much every time because traffic is almost never a factor.
I have friends that live in a nice neighborhood in a big city. They are surrounded by houses on all sides. It can easily take 30 minutes of stop/start driving through neighborhoods and traffic for them to reach the nearest grocery store, they have to hunt for a parking spot, wait in long checkout lines, etc.
OTOH I live in the woods with only one other house in sight and I can drive 20 minutes to a grocery store and it’s not crowded.
I’ll put myself into that slot. I live close to Detroit. Detroit is very, very suburban in my mind, because other than the city core, the majority of its non-industrial surface area is covered with single family houses that have yards. In most of the city, life is not like what we see on TV about city life, such as being forced to live like rats in multistory apartment buildings, having no place to put a smoker, being forced to walk in the snow to buy items from a market, not needing a car, parking structures, etc. Most of Detroit is just like the suburbs (once you control for blight).
I live in a suburb of Detroit. Other than low taxes, slightly larger lots, and newer construction, it’s pretty much exactly like most of the city, i.e., not “urban” in the sense that we worry about “urban” issues. When people take issues with “the suburbs” vs. the benefits of living in a city, I only have to look at Detroit and scratch my head; what the hell are they talking about? There’s no difference.
Yeah, 80% of us are “urban” in the sense that we live in developed rather than developing areas. We’re certainly much, much more suburban in the sense that we don’t live like rats in high rises or row houses. It’s the difference between the city as a political entity with borders, vs. “the city proper” where all the big buildings and crime and apartment buildings and parking garages are.
I live in the UK.
I’ve spent over 30 years in London (population around 8 million) and a similar length of time in a country town (population about 11,000.)
London has an incredible diversity (race, income, education, religion, politics, food, culture etc.)
My town is 99% white, has two churches (both Christian), two Indian / two Chinese and one Italian restaurant, one museum, no cinema and no theatre. The same political party has run the local council for decades.
I met one resident who was fascinated by the fact I came from London. He’d never travelled more than 30 miles from the town.
Yeah, 12 miles to work, one way, takes me a max of 15 minutes. A bit longer during tourist season with all the land barges (motor homes) on the road. My biggest traffic worry is not the asshole cutting across 3 lanes for his exit, but whether a deer or elk will suddenly jump out in front of me.
I have urban relatives who would absolutely go insane by the lack of a frantic pace to my life, but if you can make a good living in a rural area it is to me the finest life.
“I been to a town once, Del.” From Jerimiah Johnson.
“Red” USA is living in a alternate reality spawned by talk radio and Fox News.
Studies have been made that shows that a significant percentage of the information rural folks consume is just plain made up.
There may be lapses and erroneous reporting in mainstream news organizations but the sheer level of mendacity displayed by the right has no parallel on the left.
For urban people, our lifestyle is a fact of life, not bound up in our identity. We’re not waving a flag saying “I eat sushi, I am economically interdependent on others, worship my lifestyle.”
As I see it, rural people see themselves as more virtuous just by not living in the city, and just by having hobbies like hunting or gun ownership or farming (yes, it’s a hobby, and a government-subsidized one at that).
In reality, most rural people, like most everyone else, get out of bed and go to a job at some company owned by someone else. There’s nothing special or glorified about it. They’re as likely to be on food assistance as anyone else. As for farming and self-reliance, most farmers aren’t. If you’re making money farming then you’re probably getting a wage as an employee for a Big Agriculture corporation. Otherwise you’re probably taking a government subsidy to pay down a 10 year loan on a combine harvester that depends on a steady stream of replacement parts from China. Really independent, that.
Given how poorly rural people seem to appreciate their own situations, I don’t see how they could possibly have a claim on a superior understanding of someone else’s.
I’m pretty sure all this thread confirmed is what urbanites think of rural people and what rural people think of urban people. And each opinion of the other is pretty damn distorted.
I lean toward medium-sized town. Big enough to have things to do, but small enough you can get one end to the other in 10 minutes. Where I am now really suits me well. Town of about 30 thousand, plus 25000 students. It has pretty much any type of food I want, traveling shows every couple of months, a couple of little museums, a minor league baseball team, college athletics, multiple local concerts every weekend and big acts a few times a year. Trip Advisor says 189 restaurants in town, but I’m guessing that it’s closer to 150. At the same time, I’m 10 minutes from a 13 thousand acre state park and literal wilderness is an hour. The view out of my office window is a hillside that’s probably 60 or 70 acres of woods. I’m 45 minutes from the nearest ski resort. 20 minutes from the closest trout stream. I can wake up in the morning early and go fishing and still make it to work. I’m an hour and fifteen minutes from Pittsburgh and 3 hours from DC if I want to go somewhere bigger for the day. It’s a nice place to live.
Another thing that I think rural people don’t quite understand is that crime in big cities is not evenly distributed; it’s concentrated in a relatively few, usually lower income areas, and really doesn’t even spill into adjacent middle/upper income neighborhoods.
So the crime statistics can be misleading, especially when listed as “X per 100,000”- it overstates the prevalence in generally non-criminal areas, and drastically understates it in the ones where crime is prevalent.