Why are the nicest parts of the US underpopulated?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Presuming that you mean New York City: I don’t know; I’m five hours drive away, and haven’t been to NYCity in years.

By my standards, it probably is; but my standards are, that if I’m driving after dark, I expect to have my high beams on a good part of the time except when in a village (i. e., no oncoming traffic, and nobody close enough ahead of me to be bothered.)

I would say that’s a pretty good description, yes.

Some (not all) of the kindhearted folks are kind of clueless about people from other cultures. But that’s IME not a problem limited to rural areas.

42

Isn’t the question from the OP kind of tautological? I mean, if large accumulations of people make a place less attractive in terms of scenery, due to industry and housing, then won’t it always be true that the most attractive parts of the country will be the least populated?

43

Neither will anybody around here, as long as you’ve got enough land and can provide a proper backstop so you can do it safely. And while the area’s also heavily white, and I wouldn’t guarantee we’ve got no organized white supremacists, they get a lot of pushback if they try to be overtly public about it.

Being lily white may not save you, even if you don’t want to ever know anybody who isn’t. People who go in for supremacist groups are likely to turn on anybody; by their nature, they have to have somebody to beat on, and are unlikely to limit that to one group.

(A fair argument could be made for not abandoning places to them, however. I’m not saying you shouldn’t move there; I’m just saying don’t assume that your skin makes you safe.)

44

To state the bleeding obvious - the clue’s in the question.

45

Oh, I understand, and I appreciate the warning. I’ve spent plenty of time around the type. They certainly aren’t my favorite people but at least for the 20 odd years I’ve been around similar people I haven’t had any problems. While on this board, I’m one of the more conservative people, I’ve spent most of my real life as a that crazy liberal Californian since I don’t say things like “nigger and chief”.

46

In addition to all the aforementioned reasons, the people you will interact with in rural areas can be quite different than those you’ll find in cities. Or maybe a better way to put it is that you’ll have less options on who to interact with. And it can be much harder to suss out those you do want to spend time with. For example, if you’re a liberal in today’s political climate, do you want to move to a small town in (beautiful) West Virginia where 95% of your interactions will be with ardent Trump supporters? Depending on your lifestyle, tolerance level, and need for other people, this can be a deal breaker all on its own.

47

It’s not really a tautology or self-contained in the question. Plenty of unoccupied places are unattractive. Plenty of desirable places are crowded. Many scenic places are huge and can, and do, accommodate towns and sometimes cities. Also, there are plenty of ugly towns built in beautiful locales.

Part of the answer is the sheer size of the US. Part of the answer is the same reason small towns struggle to hold on to their population as younger generations seek excitement elsewhere. Part of the answer is that not much value is placed on scenery - nice places to visit…

48

Anthony Bourdain in his West Virginia episode would strongly disagree with you. If you want a more close knit friendly community oriented experience West Virginia would be wonderful. If you like to be left alone and not have to interact with the neighbors then LA or NYC would be a better choice. And there are as many ardent and loud political types in the cities as in the smaller towns.

49

Nobody goes to live in cities any more, they’re too crowded.

madsircool: “Anthony Bourdain in his West Virginia episode would strongly disagree with you. If you want a more close knit friendly community oriented experience West Virginia would be wonderful.”

The downside of living in a small town/rural area is the likelihood of everyone knowing your business and/or gossiping about you. Eventually, even “unspoiled” remote areas tend to attract other people, development ensues, and there goes paradise, as Ted Kaczynski found out while living in a cabin in a remote area of Montana.

50

Anthony Bourdain didn’t live in WV, he visited, under very special circumstances. Try moving there as any minority, gay, foreigner…hell, any stranger will be viewed with suspicion. Because ‘close knit’ is another way of saying ‘clannish’ and that’s a big part of WV identity. Friendly to visitors, yes. Friendly to new black neighbors from DC, not so much.

51

Where I live is a bit less remote so we don’t need chains on our tires, though snow tires are a really good idea. And if I want to go grocery shopping, I only need to drive to one of the nearby stores. There are grocery stores nine miles to the north, south, and west, and a really close one only six miles to the east.

Propane is the heating source of choice here. I pay about $3,000 a year to heat a 1100sqft home.

We don’t have any sidewalks. None. We did recently get a second stoplight in town which is kind of exciting. A recent pair of ballot issues voted down bike lanes (I voted against: narrow, windy roads should not be biked on, and that’s all we’ve got) but did approve signage for bike lanes. The latter passed with 200 votes more than the former failed by, which idk.

They don’t pick up the trash here - you bring the trash to the dump yourself. And you’re only allowed to use bags that cost $1.25 each when you do it. Recycling is free, though except for a long list of items you have to pay a piece by each fee for. You bring all that yourself as well.

Over half of the roads, including my road, are private. And the town doesn’t plow private roads. So I pay not only to have my driveway plowed after every snow storm, but to have from my driveway to the end of the road plowed too. One end, anyway: one of my two neighbors’ son-in-law plows the other end of our loop road. This winter was pretty mild so plowing only cost me $600.

We all have wells and septic tanks because there’s no such thing as town water or town sewer.

There are only a couple hundred 14-18 year old kids in town, so we don’t have a high school. If your kid is in grades 9-12 your choice for them is either to send them to a city school about 1/2 hour away by bus, or the town will give you part of the tuition towards a private school 20 minutes away and you pay the rest.

It is in tax-free New Hampshire, which is nice. Well, as long as you don’t consider the fact that for all the expansive services we get from the town we’re paying a more than 2.22% property tax rate. And New Hampshire allows towns to tax a home at over 100% of appraised value. I can’t recall if we’re taxed at 101% or 102% valuation this year. A fun thing was they decided in November that 1/3rd of houses in town were really under-valued. I got 30 days notice that my house is apparently worth $120,000 more than it was in 2018, and that the entire additional taxable amount was due in the December 2019 tax bill. Yay!

I’ve lived here for 22 years. In all that time there has never been a restaurant that’ll deliver to my house. I kind of doubt there ever will be.

It’s quite, and lovely to look at, and pretty much the only violence you hear about is of the black bear on white person kind, but there are definite trade-offs.

52

Small hijack. We’re thinking of doing an extended visit to the U.S. and this is the first new place I’ve added to the list. This looks beautiful.

Back to the thread.

My sister-in-law loses power about once a month, sometimes for days. Having a generator is practically required. If you’ve only lived in areas where having water, power, fuel is never a problem, living in an underpopulated area will be a shock. Having to deal with septic tanks, generators, wildlife, plus long distances to get anywhere is a big change, and many people don’t do well.

If the town is big enough, it might have a post office. But the nearest grocery store is 10 minutes, movie theater is 20 minutes and a dying mall is 30 minutes. And that’s in a rural part of a well populated area. It’s annoying that we have to get in a car to do anything.

Where I live now, the post office, a cafe, a restaurant and 2 grocery stores are reachable in 5 minutes of walking. And I can get to the airport with public transportation. In the U.S. this would mean being in a large city.

I like the wide open spaces of the U.S. But I’m not sure I would ever live there. I like having choices, and small towns don’t have many, unless they are on the freeway.

53

lack of humans … seriously.

54

My impression is a lot of larger cities are large because they are near trade routes or had historical industries settled there. This creates a positive feedback loop of people moving there for jobs and other opportunities.

Moving to a place because its pretty w/o a job lined up sounds more like the behavior of a retired person.

Now granted, if COVID causes long term changes in the job market including the ability to work remotely for large sections of the workforce, I could see smaller, cheaper, naturally scenic areas seeing an uptick in population. But who knows if that’ll happen. Theres going to be a lot of battles between management and employees to push for more WFH options.

56

A poster mentioned this but it bears repeating: isolated areas with beautiful scenery are bound to have no Internet options beyond satellite service, which based on reviews I’ve seen is not desirable.

People may think they’re up for a remote lifestyle, but won’t be happy if they can’t stream Netflix.

57

This is already happening. Luckily, I work at a place that understands that the cost of living in a high end recreational ski area is crazy. It’s really nuts. My bosses boss has already said that it’s silly for those that can WFH come into work. At all. COVID has proved we can do our jobs. remotely. Of course that isn’t true for everyone, but the less people on the roads, the better.

I’ve a co-worker that would dearly love to move into a bigger home. They are in a duplex with a 5 year old. The options near work really aren’t that great, and way, way expensive. She makes 80k/yr. She is looking at places about 100 miles from work. High end recreational communities are crazy expensive.

The good news is that when ever my wife and I go on vacation, pretty much every thing is cheaper than where we live.

I just spent $90 on 4 uncooked 8oz filets to cook up for my wife’s birthday. Yeah, it’s good local beef, but that’s like $3 an ounce. It’s kinda crazy.

58

Because when people move into a region in any quantity, they make it ugly. That’s the fundamental reason. Lack of humans = beauty. I haven’t been anywhere that doesn’t have deep beauty as long as people haven’t showed up to dam the streams, drain the marshes, fill the desert with bulldozer tracks and open pit mines, raze the mountains, poison the air, plow up the topsoil and reduce the ecosystem to corn grown in chemicals, cut down all the trees, and on and on. The places that are still beautiful are simply the places people have yet to figure out how to completely exploit – steep mountains, very cold and very hot places, the sea, and so forth.

When you are around a lot of people you get “amenities” – lots of choices and lots of conveniences. Obviously that is what almost everyone wants, otherwise they wouldn’t clump up together like they do.