It’s mostly crappy areas. Outside the urban centers, they refuse to invest in infrastructure. So everyone flees to the city center, which produces slums, and then everything except the high income areas kinda suck.
We have a lot of good infrastructure in my village and I’m pretty rural (depending upon how big ‘urban center’ is in your definition, I’m between 20 and 45 minutes away by train).
A lot of the countryside that is depopulating is quite ugly, but there is no money to invest in that infrastructure when almost the whole population is pensioners. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem to be sure. I think the government needs to do more to get people out of the megalopolises. My area has campaigns that use our tax money to pay people to move here as well as subsidizing preschool and kindergarten.
there is no money to invest in that infrastructure when almost the whole population is pensioners
The national government has plenty of money. And investing in these communities would generate permanent employment, such that more young people would live there.
But the politics of the county resists this kind of investment, because it isn’t immediately profitable.
It’s mostly crappy areas. Outside the urban centers, they refuse to invest in infrastructure. So everyone flees to the city center, which produces slums, and then everything except the high income areas kinda suck.
We have a lot of good infrastructure in my village and I’m pretty rural (depending upon how big ‘urban center’ is in your definition, I’m between 20 and 45 minutes away by train).
A lot of the countryside that is depopulating is quite ugly, but there is no money to invest in that infrastructure when almost the whole population is pensioners. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem to be sure. I think the government needs to do more to get people out of the megalopolises. My area has campaigns that use our tax money to pay people to move here as well as subsidizing preschool and kindergarten.
The national government has plenty of money. And investing in these communities would generate permanent employment, such that more young people would live there.
But the politics of the county resists this kind of investment, because it isn’t immediately profitable.