Riddle me this: why are people buying land in the boonies to move out to one day?

[Analog Kid]

Hmmm...Take a look at the long lives a lot of older folks around sort of rural areas in Newport, Washington compared to Seattle (for example). My wife's father was till driving a small truck by the age of 89. By then his mind was a little "fuzzy" so my wife's mother didn't allow him to drive. He died almost ate the age of 96. She is still walking around (using a walker), handless her finances, and works part-time at a local museum. A lot of people in that area have very long lives

By the way, my father-in-law was an Army Chaplin during WWII. His breakfast consisted of "bacon and eggs," coffee with creamer and lots of sugar, plus toasted bread.

Newport, WA Demographic Data | Homefacts

Complete demographic breakdown for Newport, WA Pend Oreille County including data on race, age, education, home values, rent, and more.

www.homefacts.com

I believe that stress leads to death a lot sooner than later. A lot of people in rural areas, specially the ones who are now retired and out of the city, don't stress as much. My wife's grandmother died at the age of 88 in 1988. Her grandfather died in 1977 in his late '80's. They were hard-working farmers. Another lady that my wife and I know, is still alive at the age of 98

Glad to hear they're all doing well!

To be clear, the thing about statistics is they look at more than a few examples and try to simplify a lot of information into a few numbers. On average, across all the counties coded as urban versus all the counties coded as rural, people tend to live longer in urban regions. You'd have to dig deeper to better understand what that means.

First to note, is that the disparity is 2 years (or was in 2009-- if trends continue, another big if, than that disparity may be a bit more now). It's a reasonable question to ask if the possibility of 2 extra years is worth spending the rest of them somewhere you're less happy, for example.

The data also averages in all rural counties-- so maybe rural Washington does better than the average rural county, or even better than the average urban county, but other rural counties do worse.

It also doesn't mean everyone in the city lives longer than everyone on the farms. It's an average across every one at birth. Live expectancy is a complex topic. The question of how long you're going to live depends a lot on how old you are. If you look at the table I linked, it says that at birth a male can be expected to live to the age of 76 but a 76 year old male can expect to live to 86. Basically the "well, you've made it this far" is baked in.

So it's possible that the average life expectancy at birth is lower for rural areas but that people live to older ages in rural areas all at the same time. For example, if infant mortality is very high in rural areas, then you'll be averaging in a lot of zeros with the rest of the data and bring the average life expectancy down. None of the early deaths can be your inlaws because they didn't live long enough to have kids.

Another possibility, is that it comes down to access to services. It's possible that all the stress and lack of exercise and fresh air in the city means people have more heart attacks but, if you have a heart attack in the city, you're more likely to make it to the hospital in time to recover. There may actually be fewer heart attacks in rural areas but if you do have one then perhaps you're more likely to die younger. But, if you never have a heart attack then access to hospitals isn't an issue and you live a long life, perhaps longer than the city slickers. So it's possible that urban folk are sicker but live longer on average yet not as long as the oldest rural folk.

Based on the more granular data, infant mortality doesn't seem to be the key driver. Only 13% of the difference is due to deaths among people younger than 25. 70% of the increased mortality looks to come from accidents, heart disease, lung cancer and COPD. Rural folks are less likely to die of AIDS or homicide though, so there's that.


It's a statistic, so it's a gross simplification of complex data and can't capture the full story. If I know nothing about 2 people other than where they'll live when they die, I can guess the rural folk will die 2 years earlier. If I know more about them, and the broader details of the dataset used in the statistics, the story gets more nuanced.

 

[bradl]

In the mid-90s I was living in Cherry Valley, California. Work was in Ontario, California. That was a 45 minute drive. Around that time Starbucks started opening their stores in SoCal. The first in my area (area being defined as San Gorgonio Pass and Redlands/San Bernardino) was in Ontario (Ontario Mills Mall area).

You gotta get through Colton and Fontana too.

45 minutes to get a cup of Starbucks coffee. 45 minutes to get back. By 1999 guess where the closest Starbucks was? Palm f*ing Springs! 30 GD minutes away. It wasn't until 2000 when Starbucks showed up in Redlands - 20 minutes away.

And where I lived? Oh you want coffee? Go down to Yum Yums or McDonalds, buy fricking Folgers at Stater Bros. There's your coffee!

F* rural, F* Cherry Valley, Banning and Beaumont. I ain't ever going back (to live there) to those places and I ain't going to live rural ever again. You cannot possibly pay me enough to deal with small town mentality and lack of convenience.

How big was yours house there?

I ask, because growing up in the middle of the Midwest, in Omaha, Nebraska, I was 3/4 of a mike from the closest bus stop to my house, which was 3400 square feet, not including the basement. It was a nice walk around a lake, but yes, it was quiet, starry, and could walk without being worried about being mugged. Another 6 blocks on the other side of that bus stop was a McDonald's, and one that I worked at, at that. So it was a good 20 minute walk to that bus stop or a 20 minute bike ride to that McDonald's. funnily enough, 6 blocks west of us was nothing but 2-lane road, and corn field when we moved there. Hell, the Old Lincoln Highway was there, and cobblestone at that time. Omaha was around 450,000 people at that time, and that was 1987, until I moved to Las Vegas in 1998.

Nowadays? If our housing development was 1 square mile big, at the end of each one of those square blocks is a Starbucks. That McDonald's is still there, and this is with Omaha expanding out another 7 miles further than where our house is. The population is still around the same, with no more than another 25000 people moving in between 1998 and now. The Old Lincoln Highway is still there, even though surrounded by housing developments, and still cobblestone. But another 2 miles west of that? still some housing developments and cornfield. Grocery stores are still within a bike ride from those homes, yet still isn't considered far outside the city, yet is still "rural", without any small town mentality or lack of convenience.

Oh, and if anyone thinks of that place as rural, the airport there is an international port of entry/customs rights landing airport (customs is located at the field), as the Mexican and Italian consulates are also in town.

My point: There are some places where you can get the best of both worlds, depending on what you are looking for and where you want to go. Get the space that you are looking for, the lower cost of living, not have to deal with population density, and enjoy the silence (thank you, Depeche Mode) without the rural/small town mentality.

BL.

 

[eyoungren]

How big was yours house there?

I ask, because growing up in the middle of the Midwest, in Omaha, Nebraska, I was 3/4 of a mike from the closest bus stop to my house, which was 3400 square feet, not including the basement. It was a nice walk around a lake, but yes, it was quiet, starry, and could walk without being worried about being mugged. Another 6 blocks on the other side of that bus stop was a McDonald's, and one that I worked at, at that. So it was a good 20 minute walk to that bus stop or a 20 minute bike ride to that McDonald's. funnily enough, 6 blocks west of us was nothing but 2-lane road, and corn field when we moved there. Hell, the Old Lincoln Highway was there, and cobblestone at that time. Omaha was around 450,000 people at that time, and that was 1987, until I moved to Las Vegas in 1998.

Nowadays? If our housing development was 1 square mile big, at the end of each one of those square blocks is a Starbucks. That McDonald's is still there, and this is with Omaha expanding out another 7 miles further than where our house is. The population is still around the same, with no more than another 25000 people moving in between 1998 and now. The Old Lincoln Highway is still there, even though surrounded by housing developments, and still cobblestone. But another 2 miles west of that? still some housing developments and cornfield. Grocery stores are still within a bike ride from those homes, yet still isn't considered far outside the city, yet is still "rural", without any small town mentality or lack of convenience.

Oh, and if anyone thinks of that place as rural, the airport there is an international port of entry/customs rights landing airport (customs is located at the field), as the Mexican and Italian consulates are also in town.

My point: There are some places where you can get the best of both worlds, depending on what you are looking for and where you want to go. Get the space that you are looking for, the lower cost of living, not have to deal with population density, and enjoy the silence (thank you, Depeche Mode) without the rural/small town mentality.

BL.

It's strange. My dad worked in aerospace, so from the time I was born until 1981 it was big or medium size cities. Long Beach, CA, Vancouver, WA, Houston TX, Redlands CA. I don't recall the size of the house I was in as an infant, but I've seen pictures of my dad painting it. It was a two story house. All the other houses were probably bigger than 2000sq ft.

In 1981 is when we moved to Cherry Valley. That house was huge, probably 4000sq feet or more. But we were renting it and a year later the owners wanted it back. That house though was at the top of a hill. All the streets in that area weren't paved. So riding a bike home from school up a steep and deeply rutted dirt hill was a challenge.

In 1983 we moved into the second house in CV. That's probably 1200-1300sq ft. I'm counting the room that the previous owners created between the main house and the garage. And this is where I really learned to hate that place. The house was unheated, had no A/C and was uninsulated. You froze in the winter and sweated in the summer.

The closest McDonalds was 15 minutes away (by car), in Banning. Beaumont didn't get a McDonalds until the mid-1990s. Alpha Beta was the closest grocery, 10 minutes away (by car). No bookstores, no malls. You had to go to Redlands for that, 20 minutes away by car.

Having lived in Redlands for a year prior to moving to CV, that's probably what made me bitter. Everything was in walking distance for a 10-11 year old boy in 1980-1981.

All my friends lived in San Bernardino or Redlands, 20 to 30 minutes down the hill. There was motivation to get my driver's license in 1986 and once I got it, I spent a lot of time away from Cherry Valley.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

Glad to hear they're all doing well!

To be clear, the thing about statistics is they look at more than a few examples and try to simplify a lot of information into a few numbers. On average, across all the counties coded as urban versus all the counties coded as rural, people tend to live longer in urban regions. You'd have to dig deeper to better understand what that means.

First to note, is that the disparity is 2 years (or was in 2009-- if trends continue, another big if, than that disparity may be a bit more now). It's a reasonable question to ask if the possibility of 2 extra years is worth spending the rest of them somewhere you're less happy, for example.

The data also averages in all rural counties-- so maybe rural Washington does better than the average rural county, or even better than the average urban county, but other rural counties do worse.

It also doesn't mean everyone in the city lives longer than everyone on the farms. It's an average across every one at birth. Live expectancy is a complex topic. The question of how long you're going to live depends a lot on how old you are. If you look at the table I linked, it says that at birth a male can be expected to live to the age of 76 but a 76 year old male can expect to live to 86. Basically the "well, you've made it this far" is baked in.

So it's possible that the average life expectancy at birth is lower for rural areas but that people live to older ages in rural areas all at the same time. For example, if infant mortality is very high in rural areas, then you'll be averaging in a lot of zeros with the rest of the data and bring the average life expectancy down. None of the early deaths can be your inlaws because they didn't live long enough to have kids.

Another possibility, is that it comes down to access to services. It's possible that all the stress and lack of exercise and fresh air in the city means people have more heart attacks but, if you have a heart attack in the city, you're more likely to make it to the hospital in time to recover. There may actually be fewer heart attacks in rural areas but if you do have one then perhaps you're more likely to die younger. But, if you never have a heart attack then access to hospitals isn't an issue and you live a long life, perhaps longer than the city slickers. So it's possible that urban folk are sicker but live longer on average yet not as long as the oldest rural folk.

Based on the more granular data, infant mortality doesn't seem to be the key driver. Only 13% of the difference is due to deaths among people younger than 25. 70% of the increased mortality looks to come from accidents, heart disease, lung cancer and COPD. Rural folks are less likely to die of AIDS or homicide though, so there's that.


It's a statistic, so it's a gross simplification of complex data and can't capture the full story. If I know nothing about 2 people other than where they'll live when they die, I can guess the rural folk will die 2 years earlier. If I know more about them, and the broader details of the dataset used in the statistics, the story gets more nuanced.

Yes, I agree about the oversimplification of such data. But other than generics, stress and the lack of rest, plus the wrong diet, probably are big factors for health decline.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

I could be wrong but I think you are presenting a bit of straw man argument here. I do not think that many people who advocate leaving city life necessarily mean to escape from many of of the things you mention. For example, I am not sure that anyone here is saying that self-reliant means they want to "fell and saw their own timber for their house or barn or smelt their own ore/smithy their nails, screws, and hinges (not to mention water pipes)" or that escape from government intrusion or rules means a desire not to use highways or roads or essential services like police, fire or healthcare.

I mean, really, there is a continuum that we are talking about when thinking about leaving a major city -- and it's not necessary to jump all the way to the extremes. I have lived in a major city all my adult life. There are certainly pros and cons and I can understand how some people view the cons as out weighing the pros -- and vice versa for that matter.

I agree with you. At least in Alaska few people want to live "off the grid, or off the road system," with is completely different to living in rural areas far from a city or town. A lot of posters are also assuming that living in rural areas means that one is far away from hospitals, but that is not always the case since rural areas could be the surrounding areas out of the city limits, but still within the within the borough or county. I live in a rural area outside the city, about 15-minute drive to the hospital.

In Alaska we have numerous isolated villages that don't have road access. During the winter the the inhabitants travel to other villages by snowmobile on frozen rivers or snow trails. There are clinics in some of the larger villages, and the only way to get to the hospitals in Fairbanks and Anchorage is by air. The larger villages have rudimentary airports (gravel, or snow landing strips). A lot of these people have medical air care (Medevac) insurance in case of a medical emergency. Most of these "villagers" are of Alaska and Canadian "Native" ancestry.

This reminds me of something that is very interesting and relates to the health of some of the Native populations along the northern coastlines: long ago the villagers living in the most remote regions of Alaska and Canada hunted various animals, and ate whale and seal. The died consisted of a high amount of seal, salmon, and whale fat. Back then they were healthier, but now they aren't. Sedentary lives, plus fast food joints arrived to some of the villages a fe decades ago. I am not "saying" that a change of diet is killing them; I am just wondering.

 

[Analog Kid]

Yes, I agree about the oversimplification of such data. But other than generics, stress and the lack of rest, plus the wrong diet, probably are big factors for health decline.

And sadly, poverty. There's a strong correlation between wealth and life expectancy, and I think rural counties tend to be less wealthy than most urban counties, so that's probably part of the difference as well. And it looks like the precent of people smoking in urban counties has gone down by half over the period discussed, but actually gone up a bit in rural counties, which doesn't help.