Rural areas also have non agricultural industry. Heck, it doesn’t make sense to do manufacturing in dense urban areas these days, which are restricted to mostly services. That means a lot of light manufacturing falls into semi rural areas.
Yes, but there you could easily have people living in medium density small towns. You don't need everyone sprawled out on huge lots as is common in the states.
This isn't some wild suggestion, living in Munich now I've gone through plenty of little Bavarian towns that are more walkable than US cities 100x as big. I think the US is a bit unusual in how once you get out of bigger cities, it's just assumed that yeah of course any kind of multi-family housing is going to be almost completely absent now, as if the economics of scale there suddenly stop existing.
The market might even achieve this by itself to a large extent, but usually zoning rules make it illegal. Plus, there are non-market effects like property taxes not taking into account how expensive it is for the government to provide services, resulting in subsidies from denser neighborhoods to sprawly ones.
> you could easily have people living in medium density small towns.
Yes, you could have those things if you had... a thousand years of history with vastly different agricultural economics, socioeconomic pressures, political pressures, and climate pressures that led to the development of those "medium density small towns" in Europe. Oh, and of course on top of those things (and largely as a result of those things) you also now had a culture that predisposed people to remaining in the communities of their birth and childhood, a much more consistent (and much higher) population density (with large cities being uniformly extremely nearby by American standards), and rural communities that benefit from exporting large amounts of high-end agriculture products.
It's absurd to imply that the only difference between a place like rural Oklahoma and rural Bavaria is "zoning rules" and "property taxes"...
100 years ago rural American living was much more like those Bavarian towns. Where do you think all of those relatively densely packed small downtowns dotted across the country came from?
What changed was the car and development policies.
Anecdote: My father grew up in the 1950s in a very rural area outside Chicago, the type of area where you gave a 10-year-old a rifle and let him wander around rabbit hunting. He once visited my house in San Francisco, from rural Georgia, for my son's first birthday. He remarked how the shops near my house, in the Outer Richmond neighborhood, reminded him of the downtown area he worked as a teenager. The downtown he grew up near is now nothing like when he was a kid. Now it's hollowed out and less dense and lively.
Yes, living in rural areas outside major (literally the second largest city in the country in 1950) metropolitan areas (especially in the Union heartland), which have population densities more similar to Europe, is somewhat more similar to Europe; but the vast majority of rural America cannot be described as being "outside" a city like Chicago.
A rural Oklahoma, New Mexico, or even California town in 1900 was honestly not similar to contemporary Bavarian towns at all. To say so is just naive and simplifies "similarity" to simple walkability (in an arbitrary, hypothetical town center). The car (and several other appliances of modernity) literally built much of the rural (and urban) American south and American west.
My dad once explained to me that in the 1950s "outside Chicago" didn't mean what it means today. It's just a geographical reference, for which I know no other better term. It was nothing but farm country where he grew up.
I've traveled across the U.S. Not on the Interstate systems, but on the old U.S. highways. I've driven U.S. 50 from San Francisco (Sacramento) to D.C. U.S. 20 from Newport, OR to Boston. U.S. 90 from Florida to Van Horn, TX, and then old U.S. 80 from Van Horn to California (with some diversions). And I took my time, driving through and often visiting every little town. It took me weeks to make each cross-country trip. And I've taken other, more circuitous routes on other trips, like a cross country where we just zig-zagged north and south visiting towns and friends while taking a mostly southernly route from the east coast to the west coast.
I also grew up in various rural towns in the Panhandle of Florida, Alabama, and (very briefly) Louisiana, in addition to [once] small towns outside Chicago. In the South, the really poor, like my family, often either lived on trailers set up on the corner of someone's farm, or in some old house near the hollowed out local downtown core. I was always acutely aware of this dichotomy, as the middle-class families lived in nether regions unlike either.
I've seen plenty of the U.S. I know exactly what it looks like today, and I have a darned good sense of what it looked like before my time. And I know that small, dense downtown areas were once extremely common. Yes, people living out on small farms was also very common, but the patterns are totally different from today. Outside the downtowns was much less dense than today (because people lived on real farms growing food, not grass on a couple of acres), while the small downtowns were much more dense than today. We're simply more evenly spread out today.
Those downtowns were never as extensive as the small towns of Europe, as in most cases they only ever had several decades to grow before people either moved on or before cars became ubiquitous. But they were there. And they were walkable; infinitely more walkable than what came afterward. The pharmacy, the mill, the doctor, the insurer, the bank, the bars, the restaurant(s), many with apartments above them, and blocks upon blocks of tightly packed single-family homes. And you can walk the husks of many of them today, especially if you stay far way from the freeways, in places where areas were never redeveloped but just slowly abandoned. I've seen the same towns over and over again all across the U.S.--Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, West Virginia, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa. They're the same everywhere.[1] Before the car became ubiquitous it couldn't have been any other way. And even after the car downtowns still thrived, extending the reach of the downtown (e.g. at the time of my father, who lived in a rural area with a multi-acre subsidence "garden" but who could catch a ride into town to work at the pizza parlor). The single-family home plots grew only modestly. It wasn't really until the freeways that the pattern of American development was truly revolutionized, draining downtowns of their vitality across the country from the 1960s onward, following the migration away from the major cities from the 1940s and 1950s. And that's a relatively recent thing in American culture and politics.
[1] I think I saw the fewest downtowns in places like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, extremely poor states where people and services have been spread out, and even where people lived in close proximity (i.e. relatively densely packed single-family homes) you still didn't see any commercial conglomerations.
> The car (and several other appliances of modernity) literally built much of the rural (and urban) American south and American west.
This is silly. That you needed a car to reach small towns from elsewhere doesn't mean you had to design the town itself to require a car for intra-city transportation.
You don't see a thousand years of different history to change zoning rules and incentives now. Significant change will take many years, even decades, but that's all the more reason to start as soon as possible.
> "medium density small towns" in Europe
Don't make excuses here. We chose poorly, and we're suffering for it, and so is the environment. Yes, there are historical reasons for why we have sprawliness and car dominance, but nobody made us do it. Don't deny people's agency.
> It's absurd to imply that the only difference between a place like rural Oklahoma and rural Bavaria is "zoning rules" and "property taxes"...
It's a pretty good thing I didn't do that, then. Perhaps you should try replying to the comment I made, rather than the one you invented.
A lot of those small towns might as well be called exurb equivalents? When you have an s-bahn train running through your small town and commuting to work at BMW or whatever is 45 minutes anyway, why not stay there?
