[MAIL] Towns in rural America are attempting to revitalize their increasingly anemic communities by incentivizing people to move out to the countryside. Cash grants, student loan pay offs and free land giveaways are just some of the enticements smaller communities are offering to a younger generation of Americans looking to leave the big city, where in some places individuals can utilize up to $80,000 worth of incentives to relocate.
According to USA Today, rural America encompasses 75 per cent of the country, but only 16 per cent of its population, the lowest in the nation's history.
Numbers show that 54 per cent of the population in 1910 lived in rural communities, but dropped to just 19 per cent in 2010, according to a report by real estate website Zillow.
USA Today explains the phenomenon is a complicated mix of many factors, but essentially boils down to rural Americans facing fewer opportunities following technological advancement and the continued consolidation of the agricultural industry.
Academics have also argued that an increasingly globalized world where free trade and competition from emerging foreign markets have created a dearth of options for Americans living in the more bucolic regions of America.
'Meanwhile, the growth of steel, automobile and other industries, along with a college education, pulled young people into urban areas where they got married and had children. Most did not return to their rural roots,' William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, explained to USA Today.
Man has historically been moving hither and thither. Sometimes Gawd is blamed, sometimes man.