It is not a substitute for living in a city. I do not see the draw in buying a cheap house in a rural community with nothing to do and nothing around it. My family owns a house in a rural community. It is dead weight. Nobody wants to buy it from us.
It is not a good place to raise your kids. The schools are under-funded. The people you interact with are bigots and they will teach your kids to be bigots.
If your kid is gifted they will sit them in a corner and do NOTHING to address how they are learning more quickly than their peers. They will suffer from under-funded schooling that is just desperately trying to keep the bottom half of the students from spilling out.
Kids are heavily influenced by their peers. There are no "garage bands" or art groups or clubs or anything for your kids to participate in. There is school and sports. If you are lucky there will be a marching band.
Also, you are assuming this person is a cis hetero white male. There IS sexism in these communities, there IS racism, there IS bigotry. You will not be welcome if you do not fit in. You WILL be confronted, you WILL be harassed.
Move away from your friends and family and community to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, make a massive investment, and cross your fingers you find friends in the community! There is no job market to speak of, so good luck when the remote work fad ends[0]!
Also pretending these communities are not extremely religious and contain bigotry is dishonest. It is out there.
[0]: which is not guaranteed but possible
It is a problem, and it’s not that most rural dwellers are bigots but enough people are, and they’re the loudest in the room.
Asking a person of color, lgbt, Muslim, etcz to live in rural white america is often a non starter.
It is in the place you grew up. Projecting negative stereotypes onto people because they share a broad group with other people you had negative experiences with is stereotyping.
> You just don't care.
Less of this, please.
How often are you actually making that trip? At that point you aren't participating in the culture of the city.
Also you aren't going to school in the city, aren't meeting people at cultural events in the city, etc. Etc.
Not that I would have wanted to do it long-term, but 60+ minute commutes are not exactly rare (and I once had one part-time), so that length of drive hardly rules out going into a city on a weeknight or weekend every 2 or 3 weeks.
I call "40 miles away" a daily commute distance.
Personally, I'm not sure that I'd want to be closer than 40 miles to downtown Chicago... but I might want to be close to a Metra line.
And everything is "close enough" to a major city, and there is enough of the city that expands out in the surrounding areas (a number of large employers aren't downtown, although some have been migrating back to the city to attract the employee demographic that prefers the city life).