Reverse Gentrification

Cities are overcrowded, and it is a trend that will only worsen with time. It’s been predicted that the majority of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050.

We choose to live in cities for myriad reasons. Cities are cultural and economic centers, where one must live for access to the arts, theater, a diversity of restaurants, and simply a healthier diversity of peoples. But the most common reason for living in a city is economic. There are simply more jobs in urban metropolises. Many would choose to live in less crowded places, subject themselves to less pollution and traffic and chaos, if given a choice. They cannot move to more rural areas because such places have far fewer work opportunities and are generally less developed. This is the case largely because there are fewer people there. It’s both a Catch-22 and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fewer people means fewer jobs means fewer people.

Of course, among the many things this past year has taught us, one of the more positive revelations has been that many of our jobs can be done remotely, from anywhere with reliable WiFi and cell service. The shifting of our economic structure in response to the pandemic has proven obsolete the belief that we need to crowd into cities and pack ourselves into office spaces. So long as there’s decent telecommunications infrastructure and a Trader Joe’s nearby, many of us could relocate to Idaho or Nebraska or any other underpopulated place that no one particularly, currently, wants to live in because of such states’ blandness and excesses of crackers.

We need to shift the great population imbalance from cities to less populated places. But not in a way that, for example, creates a comparable imbalance through which it is a concentration of either the poor or the rich who stay or go. Rather a financially, culturally, and racially diverse combination of people will migrate to less populous areas; and it will be the wealthy who are made to pay for this migration, as well as the building of infrastructure in the chosen settlements.

Apart from needing to alleviate the burden of overcrowding in cities, shifting populations in the US from concentrated urban centers to rural settings will change the electoral map for the better. The absurd imbalance of populations in this country has led to political absurdity. The less populated, more culturally homogenous (white) parts of the country hold disproportionate power over those living in cities. Cities whose populations dwarf those of whole states are at the mercy of those minority powers. This predicament has been used in arguing for the abolition of the Electoral College. While I endorse that endeavor, we could feed several birds with one scone if we were to disperse citydwellers more broadly across the country.

Prejudice and hatred, whether they be racially-, culturally-, sexually-, politically-, gender-based, or a combination, stem primarily from ignorance and fear of the unknown, as we know from the preachings of doctors Martin Luther King Jr and Charles Xavier. Contempt is bred by unfamiliarity. The places with the highest levels of hostile sentiments and violence against minorities, immigrants, any such sub-group, are those with the lowest populations of such groups. In cities, where such outlandish anomalies as black people, queer folk, and foreigners are common, public sentiment is typically not so hostile towards them. It’s far easier to fear and hate the mysterious and mostly imaginary “other” than it is a neighbor, coworker, friend, or otherwise acquaintance.

Rather than railing against the ignorance and stupidity of those with whom we disagree, it is invariably more productive to change their thoughts and behaviors through exposure and education. Condescending as fuck though it sounds, the idea that we need to move large contingents of our diverse and openminded citydwellers to the boondock and bumblefuck regions of the country to expand and better the minds and hearts of the hicks there entrenched, that is about the size of it.

Will this mass exodus and quasi-gentrification of rural America be viewed and trumpeted as an invasion of sinister motive by hypervocal reactionaries? Undoubtedly. Will they decry our actions as an attempt to change Americans’ way of life? That’s the point. There is a sizable minority in this country that has been living in the past, clinging to regressive ways which are ultimately destructive to themselves and the nation as a whole. Their insecurities and fears have long been exploited for the political and commercial gain of a cynically exploitative few. It is the case that our economic system has shut many of these people out of a decent life. It’s not completely irrational, or at least understandable, that they’d blame the “other,” the different, for their own shortcomings. But progressive reform of all systems dictating modern life is the way to improve life for the majority of us. And among the first steps to reaching that goal is letting go of old prejudices, learning, further integrating, thus spreading the wealth in every meaning of the term.