In his new book The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen argues that people have become increasingly segregated by education, income and tastes over the last 35 years or so. One result of this is declining migration rates: People are no longer moving to where the jobs are, something I have also written about.
Neighborhoods within cities and across cities are often used as examples of groups segregating themselves from other groups, but there is also segregation between rural and urban areas. While this type of segregation is fairly obvious, many urbanites seem to believe it exists because cities won’t let people in. But some of it—or perhaps a lot of it—exists because some people don’t like city living.
The 20th century was the century of urbanization in the U.S. In 1910, only 28% of the country lived in a metro area and 46% lived in an urban area, which also includes smaller cities not linked to metro areas. By 1950, 56% of the country lived in a metro area and 64% lived in an urban area. Urbanization continued to increase after World War II, and by 2010 81% of the population lived in an urban area as shown in the figure below, though most of the growth occurred in the suburbs rather than central cities.
Despite urbanization and the rapid growth of metro areas over the last 100 years, non-metro counties have held their own recently. From 2000 to 2010 non-metro counties grew by between 0.1% and 0.6% per year, though some of these gains have been lost recently.
Additionally, the population of small towns—technically urban areas according to the census—has been essentially flat: From 2000 to 2013 the total population living in incorporated places smaller than 10,000 people declined by only 0.3% (table 3).
Rural-to-urban migration appears to have stabilized somewhat, which shouldn’t be surprising. The people who didn’t care much for the rural lifestyle moved as economic opportunities changed and moving became cheaper.
The people who remain in the small towns and rural enclaves, however, are the people who appreciate the lifestyle. In economic terms, their demand for rural or small-town living is relatively inelastic, and they pass some of this appreciation on to their children through both genetics and culture.
Chad Broughton’s book Boom, Bust, Exodus, provides an example of the thought process many people from smaller areas go through when economic opportunities decline. The book tells the story of the closing of a Maytag appliance factory in Galesburg, IL in 2004 and the aftermath. Mr. Broughton writes about two of the former Maytag workers, Jackie and Shannon Cummins, regarding a potential move to nearby Chicago or St. Louis:
They had lived in cities and suburbs before but, as Shannon put it, hadn’t cared for the “hustle and bustle” and living so close to so many people. It wasn’t for them. “I don’t feel like competing,” Jackie said. “Clearly it’s a competition there, to get a house in an OK neighborhood, a better parking spot. Well, I have those things.”
Mr. Broughton goes on to write that they weren’t the only former Maytag workers who felt this way: “Displaced Maytag workers routinely chose the familiar, the secure, and the people they knew—and, consequently, lower incomes—over the unknown.”
In his bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance tells his readers that if they want to understand his family and the millions like it, a good place to start is Hank Williams Jr.’s song “A Country Boy Can Survive”. One verse in particular stands out:
I live back in the woods, you see
A woman and the kids, and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun rifle and a 4-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive
Hank Williams Jr. didn’t write this song for the people stuck in the country: He wrote it for the people who love the country. In the same way that some people would stay in New York even if the price of housing doubled tomorrow, some people prefer the country lifestyle even in the hardest of times.
And it’s not just lower-income people who feel this way. James Hetfield, the lead singer for the successful rock band Metallica, recently moved to Colorado from the San Francisco area, and his preference for a lifestyle often associated with rural areas was one reason why. As he explained:
“I kind of got sick of the Bay Area, the attitudes of the people there, a little bit. They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it’s fine if you’re diverse like them. But showing up with a deer on the bumper doesn’t fly in Marin County.”
So even if high-wage, high-employment cities such as San Francisco and others in the Bay Area, along with New York City, Boston, Washington D.C. etc., experience a building boom and housing prices decline accordingly, is that enough to get a wave of lower-income, rural people—or people like Hetfield who appreciate aspects of that lifestyle—to move there? Probably not.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue policies that make housing cheaper in cities. Cheaper housing would induce some people, especially younger, less-settled people, to move to cities for financial reasons. It would also make it easier for urbanites to move between cities, say from Sacramento to San Francisco or Baltimore to New York.
Moving to opportunity is still the best way for many people to improve their financial situation, but cheaper housing is probably not going to start a new wave of rural-to-urban migration since it isn’t the main barrier keeping those people out of America’s booming metropolises. The truth is, many of them just don’t like cities.
