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What do all the people do (for work) in rural area towns and unincorporated areas?

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.

qooqie ,

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

Boozilla ,
@Boozilla@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Beeps ,

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.

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever ,

Truckers generally are more of a suburb and outskirts thing. Mostly because you still need to get to the distribution centers to pick up cargo.

I could imagine a few truly independent truckers (own their own rig) who live in the middle of nowhere between seasons. But they likely are also smart enough to not want to risk their truck breaking down way the hell away from anything that can help them.

That said, other seasonal workers like people who work on oil rigs or fly out to do basically every Alaska based job that the Discovery Channel lives off of can potentially live in the absolute middle of nowhere. But… most of them likely want a place to spend their cash if you catch my drift.

robocall ,
@robocall@lemmy.world avatar

There are people that drive 45+ minutes each way for their job.

rev ,

Remote work

itadakimasu OP ,
@itadakimasu@lemmy.world avatar

Remote work is only widely possibly in the last few years. Most homes I drove past are well kept century homes on 1-10 acre lots

Takumidesh ,

The work is still remote, they just have to drive to the remote location :)

In all seriousness, most people just commute to the nearest town or city.

elephantium ,
@elephantium@lemmy.world avatar

My grandma used to call her town a “bedroom” community. 600ish people lived in town with most commuting for work. IIRC, there are a couple of nearby towns with around 3k people, the biggest city in the county having 12k people. One of the state’s major cities is around an hour away; think 100kish people.

I used to think that would be too far to commute, but from other comments on this post, it sounds common.

Behaviorbabe ,

Behavior therapy. Once I move I’ll be completely remote. New England is also weird because little towns get nestled into what you might assume are county roads.

lingh0e ,

I’m from Cleveland. I’ll take a week vacation and drive through NY, VT and NH every year or two. The drive is really amazing. It’s really awesome how you can just be cruising down a remote county road at 60 mph, going over hills and around bends then BOOM, you need to drop to 30 because there’s a few hundred yards of really old houses and maybe an old church or gas station or pharmacy… then one Dollar General… then back to miles of 60mph of scenic nothing.

Behaviorbabe ,

Haha yeah. Meanwhile if you take that same trip in other places the roads slowly become dirt, then trails, then fields.

h0usewaifu ,
@h0usewaifu@lemmy.world avatar

My husband is an engineer that works in plants and factories. The last three places he’s worked at were rural, or at least further from the city center. COL is typically lower in these areas, too, so lot of people get by on lower paying factory or service jobs, and as someone else said, a lot of retirees, too.

debounced ,
@debounced@kbin.run avatar

SO and I are in engineering fields and the bumfuck midwest was a commonality in job opportunities for both our areas of study (ChemE and EE). We bought a decently sized house and 10+ acres several years ago (thank jebus... definitely couldn't afford it now) that's about 30 minutes away from the "major" town where both our companies have an office/plant, but since COVID everything is semi-work from home now... that is, until management decides they need to lay people off and force everyone back into the office.

I'll be honest, we probably aren't going to stick around here for much longer... had a kid and the daycare options are terrible and I really don't want them growing up with the regressive politics that have gotten out of control. We'll gladly take our high earning jobs and associated state income taxes somewhere else rather than subsidize the bullshit... but its been nice being to amass a sizeable savings/investments and pay off all debt before the next move.

BrerChicken ,

I teach their children how to use math to do physics.

Rhynoplaz ,

“Blasphemy!!! Keep that voodoo magic out of my small town school!”

-probably someone, somewhere in BFE.

schmalls ,
@schmalls@lemmy.world avatar

There are a lot of teachers and school administrators. Others will work at whatever factory or do welding or machining at a local fab shop. My dad always was driving an hour for work and I did for a while when I moved back out here until I got a remote job in software.

Nioxic ,

Lots of people i noticed are either commutinf quite a lot, or they work in construction or with carpentry etc. They can often find jobs out in rural areas, but of course, thats in Denmark and nothing is ever really ‘rural’ like in australia or some parts of the US

fubo ,

Some of those rural New England towns have colleges. A town like Williamstown or Great Barrington MA has the local college as the largest employer. (With a town population around 7000, that’s not too difficult.)

Some have significant tourist trade, sometimes year-round. (In the fall, the leaf-peepers come up from the city to see the foliage.)

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

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.

wjrii ,
@wjrii@kbin.social avatar

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.

dan1101 ,
@dan1101@lemmy.world avatar

Our business does electronic assembly and sells the products online and sells web services. We get UPS and FedEx and USPS, and have a serviceable internet connection.

bandario ,
@bandario@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

DickFiasco ,

Often times, one or two large companies employ a significant fraction of the community. In my (rural) hometown we had a university and an industrial battery factory. Almost half of all the families in town had at least one member employed by either the university or the factory.

Treemaster099 ,

I kinda thought that was how most small towns worked. We got a couple big factories that take up a big chunk of the workforce here. They have a huge amount of power in controlling the wages for the town, which is always worrying. They pay the highest, but it’s still not very high

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