Ask HN: How many people on Hacker News live in rural areas? I know the majority live in urban areas. But when I read a post about something like electric bikes or walkable cities, I can’t find a single comment supporting a rural lifestyle. I’m not complaining, just shocked that there aren’t even a few. |
These places do exist - you just have to hunt them out.
Edit: I am in Europe.
Bought a small farm year ago near my home village. Life is good here. Only downside is that I like sitting on my desk less than when we lived in the city :)
We have an ALDI here at least.
There are a few advantages to settling here:
- Quiet: As long as you’re off the main road by a mile or so.
- Cheap: Land sales are usually FSBO and you have to be in the know. Locals generally don’t like selling their land to where it ends up on Zillow.
- Utilities: Most land is federal or state owned but the few private lots often have power and telecom on one end of the property.
- Building permits: Easy to get in unincorporated county assuming you’re outside of TRPA. As long as you are not cutting down trees, you’re good (usually)
- Allergies: I find it easier to breath even very thin air (elevation is about 5000 feet)
But there are also some drawbacks, too:
First off, Snow. The mountains get loads of this goddamn frosty Satan jizz. People cannot drive with it being either too cautious or too aggressive - both are very dangerous, sometimes it blocks private roads so you’re trapped until a neighbor with the snow blower is kind enough to come clear the road (there is a startup idea here I’m sure). For the driving part, there are few feelings worse than stepping on your brakes and realizing they have frozen over despite needing them to be functional in about 3 seconds. Snow also also breaks random stuff, allows water enter orifice, turns into black ice, makes going grocery shopping dangerous, and in general is a scourge if you have to go outside for any reason.
On a similar topic, convenience. In the city, I can generally find 24/7 stores. We have a handful of Safeways, WinCo, and 7-Elevens. In the mountains, things shut down for any weather, it’s 20 miles away, and the gas station may be closed. So you have to stock up, on everything. I have 10 gallons of gasoline in two 5gal containers (that I cycle through regularly), propane (so many tanks, all either full, partially used, or empty), canned food, frozen food, indoor dried, de-pested firewood, drinkable water, sat phone, spare adjustable tire chains, the list goes on.
Lastly, the weird shit that just happens. All the odd things you see in the deep woods, on your property cameras, random people that have no business being there (lost tourists, tweakers, illusions, etc). I saw (on my cameras) a guy in full business attire walk up to my remote cabin, look around then look directly at the camera, and casually walk the away. I’ve seen on a hike a newish Kia Optima stopped in the forest, driver side door open, keys in ignition, chime still ringing. From my porch, I’ve seen a girl in a white night gown walking along the ridge across the road at night. I’ve also seen strange shit like a mini cement obelisk, shrines to deerman, a wooden staircase to nowhere, half buried vehicle from the 1950s. I’ve also seen several bears, a mountain lion (well, two but one was someone’s pet and was dangerously sweet), deer like crazy (but no deerman yet). Also, it gets very dark. Darker than you can imagine sometimes.
Despite all of this, making your own power and being off grid is cool.
I grew up in the Kimberley on cattle stations, went to high school in the Pilbarra , and travelled 1,000 km to university (1980s).
I did a lot of STEM courses, built robots, remote signal aquisition instrumentation, pre Google Maps global mapping software (and data processing) travelled the world (two thirds or so of the 190+ countries) zeroing in WGS84 against old mapping systems and doing a bit of exploration geophysics.
I currently mostly live in the wheatbelt district, large farms you can shoot 5,000+ yards across (*), and live a fairly rural lifestyle - with drones, GPS controlled two storey machines, multi spectral crop imaging, etc.
(*) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE
We like walking and do a bit of track maintenance (**) and prefer motorbikes over cars (***)
I have no LinkedIn, Facebook, Github profile .. just a backlog of people and companies I've worked with since the late 1970s.
There's a Radio Quiet Zone here for the SKA Square Kilometre Array which has ongoing odd jobs, there and on the super computer farm. Some kid I used to joke about with on the School of the Air when we were in short pants is now some kind of multi billionaire with agriculture, aquaculture, mining, green hydrogen, etc stuff going on.
We (circle of scaly mates) started a few companies when short of things to do, back whenever .. these are still about in various forms - one got picked up by the US Standard & Poor for their intelligence desk.
This week I'm making the cage over the peach tree parrot proof, pitchforking sawdust and shit underneath the fig tree, and waiting for a call to come and be a chase bin driver (pulling up behind and parallel to a moving combine harvester to take the offload back to the bins .. rinse, repeat).
Mining companies like data driven solutions, there's a lot of mapping | survey work, Rio Tinto is automating the Feck of everything, Trains, Trucks, and so on.
There's lab work, lawyers up the whazoo, accounting firms, parts and tradespeople warehousing yards - so a lot of that type of web | office support stuff happening.
Other than that, it’s a dilemma. I have a spectacular view, living on a ridge, but except for the gas station/quicky mart, everything “a.k.a. Downtown” is 12 miles away and all the stores not named hardware stores are 50 miles away. So are colleges
DSL internet is the best you can get here. There’s one hospital in town, whose board is just short of fistfights at meetings.
Just have a toolkit handy for when something lets loose in a winter storm, and an evacuation kit ready at all times in case of wildfire. And don’t try to grow roses, because they are candy to deer. You need a 7 foot high fence to keep them out.
Civilization has its advantages.
It's a 50ft tower powered by PoE Ethernet.
100-250 mbit/s down, 50-80 mbit/s up
Nearest megacity Kolkata (Calcutta) is ~140 km away. ~3.5h by car or train. We visit the city for any serious enough health issues or big shopping events or to catch flights.
My town is historical and extremely old (mentions in literature go back 600 years or more). It is very walkable. Everything is some minutes away. Fresh organic vegetables, fish, and meat available in the market 5 minutes away. The High School I went to was 15 minutes away (using bicycles).
We have a ~100 cc motorbike (50 kmpl or 117 mi/gallon) and bicycles that we ride. For family, we hire fully electric tuktuks [0]. Very cheap and environment friendly.
Very calm town with non-existent crime. Can get reliable broadband up to 250 MBPS. Amazon does 1 and 2 day deliveries. (I cannot imagine living here without ecommerce and internet)
Big fan of this lifestyle. Can comfortably afford a car but we don't own one because we don't need one.
Lived in Kolkata before. Everything was so far away. Had to spend money to get anywhere. Spent too much time in commute to everywhere. And the amount of money you save by living here adds up. My father also lived in the same house, as did my grandfather.
[0]: https://assets.telegraphindia.com/telegraph/02metanup4.jpg
BUT: Even though this sounds big: I do not have access to Greenwheels (car ride sharing service) this is only available in big cities. Specialty shop that promote more green, no plastic and healthy stuff: big cities not in my town.
Miss carding my own wool and spinning my own yarn though. That was nice and meditative.
I think the major reason why you don't see support for rural living as often (or, as you noted, at all) is, well, the people who want walkable cities and bicycle infrastructure are the folks for whom economic opportunity is predicated on being close to the city. As it turns out, that's where the majority of industry happens to be.
It also turns out that cars are annoying when going slow and steady to get someplace (and enjoy the moment all the while) is just as fine.
(Is that truly why I used to abuse my old Case that way? Maybe!)
The majority of certain kinds of industry. Finance, software, fashion, marketing, sure. I grew up surrounded by people working at chemical plants, rotating shifts at off-site drilling platforms, dock workers, etc. The other side of town, ranchers. Another side of town, sugar processing and sugar farms. Other than the dock workers and offside drillers (on their off-times) potentially being more urban-adjacent, neither of these two industries are really dense urban area kinds of industry.
Then, up the highway a bit, was Houston.
I don't see many car manufacturing plants deep in dense urban areas in the US. Loads of large manufacturing in the US happens well outside those dense urban areas. Living in most dense US cities is expensive. Real estate is way more expensive. Imagine trying to build commercial airliners in Manhattan or San Francisco.
If Everett, WA; Renton, WA; and North Charleston, SC, are not urbanized areas, what are they?
If a factory with a ZIP code in San Antonio, TX, isn't in a city, where is it?
Going closer to home for me: is Red Bud, IL, not a city? Hecker? Freeburg? Mascoutah? Belleville?
That city job I wrote about was not in St. Louis.
The rurals are here but you have to be quiet to notice them.
(The majority of the rurals are considered urban by the US census, btw.)
I wonder if there's some administrative reason the census considers huge cities and little villages both 'urban'?
Also remember when the Census was begun, the divide was much more stark between rural and urban as you couldn't travel quickly.
If you are young, cities can be great for social life. I used to live right outside of DC after college and it was great when the important things in life were enjoying social gatherings and meeting girls.
Now that Im much older, I prefer seclusion because I don't really care that much for making new friends, and on the flipside I don't have to deal with idiots who inconvenience people around them because of careless, negligence, or stupidity.
And at this moment at the airport waiting for takeoff for a business meeting.
I've lived far more rurally in the past, long commutes down metal roads with the occasional ford, septic tanks, private water schemes supplying algae-green water from rivers that rise in the front ranges, Internet via microwave or satellite or... ...dial-up giving 2KiB/s if you're lucky, electric fences often lowered the bit rate on copper.
I'm not sure why you think a rural lifestyle needs supportive comments. It's, after all, a choice we make, because we're privileged enough to be able to.
TIL metal road is actually gravel road in NZ.
Even ignoring the posts that just straight-up assume all tech workers (or at least all the ones worth considering) are in Silicon Valley, I've seen so many posts that assume, in various ways, that tech workers live in cities. Or even that basically everyone lives in cities.
From people talking about self-driving cars ignoring that rural roads (including gravel and dirt roads) exist, or that roads exist that might not get plowed/sanded immediately after snowfall, to people talking about employment and compensation just assuming that any tech worker can instantly find a new job paying as much as or more than their previous job if anything goes wrong, to people talking about nutrition, health, and food assuming that everyone has access to a wide variety of great supermarkets and specialty stores...
The bias is real, and it's so deeply disappointing a lot of the time.
Even worse are the people who appear to genuinely believe that we would be better off if no one lived outside of cities. They never seem to have much answer to questions like, "Then who's going to grow the food?" beyond handwaves.
Projects take a bit longer as there's no Fry's or Radio Shack around the corner. You tend to stock more things on hand, and Amazon Prime is a godsend. Cars are still a thing, and you have to drive them yourself! I wave to neighbours when I pass them. Look up at night and there's lots of twinkling lights in the sky which aren't Starlink trains.
Aside from that it's just like city life.
Hey, just a thought, have you ever tried Velcro, or zippers?
There are two art/craft/design schools in town, one of which has been here for nearly a century, resulting in a regular influx of young people with creativity and energy (of which a handful stay in the area) as well as a populace that’s become accustomed to new ideas and new ways of doing things through generations.
I’m a member of a non-profit association (consisting primarily of former students who stayed) that operates a co-working space, which is where I work most days. Working alongside primarily non-tech folks is wonderful—no need to talk tech during lunch or breaks.
It’s not all roses. It’s a poor region with declining population (and therefore worsening quality of municipal services). I think remote work could play an important role in revitalizing the area, but I’m naturally a bit biased about that.
Check out https://greytontourism.com - our villages answer to Airbnb, made by yours truly
Totally agree with your point though: a large segment of the car hatred movement types strike me as lacking significant perspective.
That said, even rural areas shouldn’t require cars nearly as much as they do in the US now. Trains can service rural areas as well the same as they do in Europe.
I have to drive a car everywhere.
I live on an island in WA state, USA. I’ve got a spectacular view of Admiralty Inlet & the Olympic Mountains, and a workshop big enough for my CNC machine and other equipment. I’m using the workshop on weekends to make weird Arduino-powered clocks and LED art, which I sell on Etsy for beer money.
Where I grew up we'd have the neighbors cows wander into our yard and eat our plants when they got out. The Census defined it as urban.
So when I see Renton, WA and you ask if it's "urban", well yeah I'd agree it's urban by the census and limited binary choices. Is it "urban" like San Francisco or Manhattan or even Seattle? Not even close, it's far from that still. It's almost all single family detached homes.
For me, the occasional farm interspersed between single-family homes (or the occasional subdivision of single-family homes interspersed between farms, same deal), strip malls, and Boeing Field (or, in my case, Scott AFB) isn't it. That's merely the outskirts of town.
Alternatively, if you have any chance at all of being reached by anything other than a 50 kW AM radio station from a major city like KMOX, you're probably some semblance of urban.
Similarly, if you can have mail delivered to your street address and not merely a shared delivery point, you're probably some semblance of urban.
Densely urban? No, absolutely not.
