My old boss moved to his lake house / cabin since he could work from home full time. I know many people who would love to if they could. Universal WFH could have massive boons for small towns if it was allowed.

I was WFH in a rural area for a long time, and my relatively high income and flexible schedule gave me a lot of time to get involved in the community, while supporting a ton of local businesses.

Yep. My household is WFH 100% and we moved to a small town (Iowa). We're not especially high-paid for the tech industry, but we are above the local median income by almost 10x. We try to spend with local businesses as much as possible to help get money into the local economy, but there's only so much locally-made/available stuff.

And then every president afterward made it worse. And why wouldn't they? 99% of voters keep enthusiastically stamping their approval on it every two years.

With the way rural voters get disproportionate voting power its insane that rural broadband isn't everywhere. Shows how money interests take over rural interests in that party

Duh: Rural towns usually have terrible Internet. Who would want to live with that every day‽

In my experience this isn't always the case. A small town I lived in once had gigabit for $80/month whereas the city I lived in before that had 250mbps internet for something absurd like $270/month and it even had a bandwidth cap.

Right now I live in the middle of nowhere and the fastest thing available is 100mbps but it's only $50/month. I probably have a better internet situation than most people at least in terms of what I'm getting for the price.

I think some small internet companies just didn't get the memo on enshitification.

I live in a very small town, and I have 1.5 Gbps internet, and haven't met a single trumper.

Okay, rent/mortgage is 3 grand a month

You have no idea WTF you're talking about. Mortgages in rural towns are absolutely no where near $3,000/mo. Not even close. Try under a grand.

Let me go pick a random rural town in upstate, NY: Newark, NY. The population was 9,017 at the 2020 census according to wikipedia.

Here's a house: 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 1,400 sqft., 0.2 acre lot: $90,000. Estimated monthly payment: $569. If you take home $40k a year after taxes, that's 1/6 of your monthly income.

That took 5 seconds of searching. Sure, it might need a new roof soon, and new carpets, and some paint. But all that makes it $130k tops.

So what the hell are you smoking? Do you even know what rural means?

The town? Yes, they're usually pretty boring.

But if you can't find something to do out in nature then I'd argue it is you who is the boring one.

Then again, I like boring so YMMV

Can confirm. My local group assumes you are queer and neurospicy until you state otherwise.

I live in a small town, and I love it. Rent is cheap, I can bicycle to the grocery store, and it’s just 30 minutes from a major city where all the cool stuff happens! The only downside is nobody wants to commute to my place for house parties

Same! I consider that last bit a win, a couple of times a year is enough for me.

if your small town has a small town theater

We did, but they didn't make enough to stay in business. One of the local churches bought it instead of paying to renovate their place of worship. I haven't been over there, but I assume their youth movie nights are top-notch.

Same. We absolutely love living in a small town.

The small town a lot of my family lived in has literally nothing to do. Going to Walmart and teen pregnancy were basically the activities of choice. Now meth (and teen pregnancy, tbh) is the activity of choice because people are so fucking bored. You couldn't pay me to live there. Plus, the jobs that are available are almost universally garbage. It's great that you're happy there, but plenty of the people who live in those towns are miserable but don't have the ability to leave for some reason or another.

Not everyone in rural towns is a right wing redneck

Not everyone, sure. Please post the name/location of your town so we can all have a look at it with Google Street View!

It's prejudice, plain and simple. They're ruled by their ignorant preconceptions based on the limited exposure they get online. Yes, there are shitty small towns, just like there are awful cities, but many small towns are amazing. These people wouldn't know, because they've never left their own neighborhood.