I think this is very short-sighted, on the order of "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"
The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
> "Why should we subsidize package / letter delivery to people in the sticks?"
Good point, it doesn't make much sense to do that either.
> The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.
Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
> Or, we could zone areas to encourage people to live in towns where it's feasible for both corporations and the government to provide infrastructure and services at a reasonable cost.
This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.
But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?
Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.
Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.
> But not the educators teaching the farmer's kids, or the doctors and nurses treating their wounds? What about the clerks at the grocery store serving those farmers? The liquor store?
They can be in a small town in the region, which is where the school and liquor store probably already are.
The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.
I'm a social democrat, I'm fine with subsidies in general, I just want them to be applied intelligently. Spending a lot of money to subsidize someone's lifestyle that's intentionally inefficient isn't smart.
I'm all for helping the poor, but we should do it in a way that gets us a lot of bang for the buck.
They're not 'the poor' though. If you own a $20 million of land why is everyone rich and poor in the city paying a dollar to fund your faster internet?
Small family farms are defined as those with annual gross cash farm income (GCFI) of less than $350,000; in 2011, these accounted for 90 percent of all US farms. Because low net farm incomes tend to predominate on such farms, most farm families on small family farms are extremely dependent on off-farm income. Small family farms in which the principal operator was mostly employed off-farm accounted for 42 percent of all farms and 15 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $788. Retirement family farms were small farms accounting for 16 percent of all farms and 7 percent of total US farm area; median net farm income was $5,002.
Estimated median total income for farm households increased in 2024 relative to 2023. Median income from farming decreased while median off-farm income increased in 2024 relative to 2023. At the median, household income from farming was -$1,830 in 2024. Given the broad USDA definition of a farm (see glossary), many small farms are not profitable even in the best farm income years. Median off-farm income in 2024 was $86,900, while the median total household income was $102,748.
The 80 year old house on a woodlot that a teacher is living in should be closed so they can buy a more expensive one in town?
This isn't (all) new construction of people deciding to cast off the shackles of urban living and shoveling sidewalks and deciding to move out into the more rural parts of the state... but rather people living in houses that are 50 or more years old that their parents passed on to them.
These are houses that were built in the early to mid part of the previous century that had two wires running - one for power, one for phone.
The idea that because you are not-farmer you should live in a city seems quite prescriptive.
People are living in rural parts of the country not because of the convinces of urban living, but rather because that's where they can afford to buy an old house and even with the additional utility costs (buying propane, septic, well) it is still less expensive than trying to buy a new construction house in the suburbs.
The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.