> I think we should start to encouraging people to go to a uncool city and help build it up and make it cool.

While this is a laudable project and it works in some places, many rural citys are very conservative and against anything new the youth might be interested in.

This is the issue I face in the area where I grew up and still reside in rural New York. If you read the newspaper editorials it's a constant string of racist and homophobic garbage. I'm approaching 30 and it's very hard to find like minded people here, much less single women with ambitions and who aren't just looking for a baby daddy.

So why haven't I moved? Frankly I'm scared that I can't cut it elsewhere. My job is secure and pays very well for the area (as a single person I make about 160% of the median family income). I could move and work remotely for the same amount which would result in a drastic decrease in quality of life, or try to get another job that I'm probably not qualified for. I've been trying to figure it out for the better part of a decade now.

Where in upstate? You should look up Duncan Crary, who lives in Troy, NY. He did a ton of podcasts with James Howard Kunstler, and has a newer one called a Small American City. It is about this very topic of revitalizing small American cities. There is also Ithaca, NY.

A few days late but I'm way farther north than Troy -- St. Lawrence county. I can check out the podcast, though.

Interview and see what happens. What do you have to lose?

I was speaking with a friend about this recently. I do think we'll see growth in smaller cities, kind of like how Austin exploded. I think an interesting aspect of this is the job problem. Jobs are getting more scarce outside cities as industries change it seems, and I wonder how that might affect population movement.

"I think we should start to encouraging people to go to a uncool city and help build it up and make it cool." -

This basically describes the prevailing attitude in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is super cheap and has all the fancy cocktail bars you will ever need.

It was definitely like this for previous generations. Young people have been moving to big cities they could barely afford for at least 100 years, and probably since Roman times.

It wasn't really that true in the US for about the 50 years after WW II. Yes, NYC and maybe a few other places. My cohort from undergrad and grad school in the 80s or so did not widely live in cities (again, with the totable exception of people I knew in finance many of whom lived in Manhattan). And, at least in Boston/Cambridge, there was very little "tech" in the city. After Teradyne moved out, there may have still been some consulting but not a single product company of any size.

That's somewhat different today but it's really a very recent change.