OT- Oregon Counties Vote to join Idaho

[Pounder]

[SW_Mustang]

I actually like the country and small towns and feel Boise/Nampa/Meridian is insane right now. Houses go on the market for 24 to 48 hours and they are eaten up without people even looking at them. Today on the commute a car almost hit me, practically getting used to it by now, it's like a NASCAR track, much different than when I moved down here. A lot of total jerks have moved here, too. It's just not the pleasant mid-sized city it used to be, but even the natives are boasting about all the growth. Have fun with it.

Bottom line on the boonies: They need metro areas to survive, period. Their schools receive needed state support as do their roads and social services. When I drive north most of the villages (not towns) I go through are hanging by a thread, no jobs, boarded up stores, nothing going on except fast food. Cities are keeping what's little left alive to these towns. Kids today are wise, they can get on the internet, YouTube or Google Earth, click on some locales they might want to live in and say, "That sure looks a lot better than the place I'm living in now." Then they can check housing/apartment prices, cost of living ... none of that was available when I was growing up (showing my age). I know very few kids who live in small nothing towns who want to stay in them.

Heck, my friend's kid couldn't wait to get out of Boise and went to SoCal for college with a huge academic scholarship. He wasn't an elitist, he just wanted to try something new.

For sure, I do too. I just meant in a practical sense - there's not much benefit to living in a rural area anymore, for the vast majority of people. Living out there is definitely becoming a "luxury," in a sense. There are some great rural areas, but even those places aren't anywhere near self-reliant.

The kids today are much more aware of what's going on, I think. It's not hard to look around and realize that your opportunities might be limited to the service industry, or at best agriculture - which is surprisingly hard to get a job in if you're an outsider to that world. Compound that with the lack of simple amenities like walkability and food options, and it's no wonder why kids and young adults are vacating the rural areas.

What I don't get is how demand for housing goes down, technically - with everyone moving out, yet I still can't find a reasonably priced place to live. But that's a rant for another day.