Drive through rural America and see how many underpopulated small towns there are. Shuttered businesses for lack of customers. Abandoned buildings. These places need people.
For comparison, here in Brazil I lived most of my life in a town with ~35K residents and it was already considered a small rural town. Some of my family lives in a neighboring town with ~11K residents, and even in my hometown people joke about how small it is, and that there’s basically nothing going on there. 1288 of towns in Brazil have less than 5K residents, or about 23.1%, and there are no towns with less than 500 residents. Meanwhile in the US 76% of towns have less than 5K residents.
Again, it’s just kind of wild to me. I remember playing (reading?) the Echo VN and thinking “Man, a dying town with only 50 people? That doesn’t sound realistic,” but apparently that’s way more common than I thought.
My slightly educated guess would be that’s a consequence of America’s race westward in the 1800’s, only stopping long enough to annihilate the indigenous population and set up a rest stop for the next batch.
It’s more modern than that. I don’t have time to look for stats, but I believe there’s been general migration to cities for like half a century or more
We also have “towns” that are insufficient in size and unlisted or are under another towns “address”. A town near me has less than 1000 people and that includes the towns under it that are 3-5mi apart.
Drive through rural America and see how many underpopulated small towns there are. Shuttered businesses for lack of customers. Abandoned buildings. These places need people.
It’s kind of wild to me how many really small towns there are in the US. About 32% of towns in the U.S. have less than 500 residents.
For comparison, here in Brazil I lived most of my life in a town with ~35K residents and it was already considered a small rural town. Some of my family lives in a neighboring town with ~11K residents, and even in my hometown people joke about how small it is, and that there’s basically nothing going on there. 1288 of towns in Brazil have less than 5K residents, or about 23.1%, and there are no towns with less than 500 residents. Meanwhile in the US 76% of towns have less than 5K residents.
Again, it’s just kind of wild to me. I remember playing (reading?) the Echo VN and thinking “Man, a dying town with only 50 people? That doesn’t sound realistic,” but apparently that’s way more common than I thought.
My slightly educated guess would be that’s a consequence of America’s race westward in the 1800’s, only stopping long enough to annihilate the indigenous population and set up a rest stop for the next batch.
It’s more modern than that. I don’t have time to look for stats, but I believe there’s been general migration to cities for like half a century or more
We also have “towns” that are insufficient in size and unlisted or are under another towns “address”. A town near me has less than 1000 people and that includes the towns under it that are 3-5mi apart.