Drove hundreds of miles through some very rural New England, USA today. Most areas were very nice with well kept homes and cute, small city centers (mostly only a couple of brick, commercial buildings).
What do people do for jobs out in the “middle of nowhere”? As an engineer who works closer to city areas where more jobs exist, I just can’t fathom what people are doing for jobs out there? How is everything paid for?
Edit: I should clarify there’s minimal farm land out in rural New England. So, not very many farmers at all.
A lot of people don’t work (retired, married a bread winner, or students living off mom and dad).
And there are of course telecommuting jobs now.
And even rural areas have doctors, dentists, plumbers, electricians, gas stations, delivery services, daycare, schools, libraries, churches, post offices, and countless other “invisible” employers that are easy to forget about when you live in a metropolitan city with dozens or hundreds of major corporate employers.
There’s also truckers with over the road/long haul jobs. You and you family can live anywhere when your job is to drive across the country.
Some people will do jobs that bring money into the town such as engineers, hospital workers, etc. Others provide a service to these people such as restaurants and they make their money off them. People overestimate how much you need to survive in a rural community. It’s extremely cheap compared to big cities which is why rural tends to be heavily associated with low income communities
There are people that drive 45+ minutes each way for their job.
9 times out of 10, small rural communities are built up around natural resources, farming, military bases, or tourism. For instance with farming, that creates the need for tack shops, farm equipment sellers, mechanics, chemical distributors, end product distribution etc. With those industries in the core, you get lots of secondary industries.
Then once you have something keeping people around, education and healthcare become sort of self-sustaining employment sectors, leading to a kind of “invisible” government subsidy that will keep a place hanging on even if the original industry fades. These days, it’s closing the hospital or school that truly kills off a town.
Is forestry happening in the area? A few thousand hectares of well managed forest creates hundreds of jobs. A couple of timber mills and all the labour that powers them, mechanics and saw doctors for those.
Trucks to haul the lumber, machines and operators to cut and extract it, and the mechanics for those. Machines to prepare the site for replanting and the operators and mechanics for those. Ground crews to plant trees. Foresters to manage the forest and all of the beaurocracy and hierarchy that comes with that. Fire management crew, science and research crews, plot measurers, tree markers…
Then you need another whole industry to keep this small army plied with booze and food.
