A lot of really eager and excited folks tell me they want to move to the area I live in to help pull it politically left (great! Come on in. We've got t-shirts.)
I hope some of them manage it, but I wanted to talk a little about the constraints you're likely to encounter if you do.
1) What are you going to do for work?
I work a day job, remotely, for a company in CA. My wife runs three local businesses. Working for a small business or working remotely are basically your only options.
In this town, our largest employers are: The chicken plant (Hard, gross, shift work), the rock quarry (Hard, gross, shift work), the lumber mill (hard, often shift work), WalMart, the local government, the Cabin Rental companies and Air BNB cabin cleaners, the larger restaurants, the Apple Barns (seasonal), and ... well, me. Mountain Town Industries covers The Makerspace, an Antique Mall, a record label, a regular series of concerts, the coffee shop, the toy store, New Ellijay Television, and our coffee roasting.
All told, there are probably 30 folks working for us (and we're spread entirely too thinly.)
And... That's it! More than half the people who live here either work remotely or commute more than an hour.
2) Everything you've grown to expect in terms of infrastructure living in a large city is out the window.
Our home has a 768k downstream DSL connection (and we're pretty far from the local DSLAM, so 768k is nominal at best.)
When storms come through, our power goes out. Monthly at least, sometimes more. At least once a quarter, it's out for more than 8 hours. It has been out for as long as 8 days.
Our water comes from a well. When something goes wrong with the well, we have to figure it out ourselves.
Our roads are less "road" and more "mud slick with rocks in" and probably more hole than road too.
(this gets less bad the closer to the town you are. The power goes off just as often, but it stays off for less time. Within the city limits, you get sewers and municipal water.
At my home, we have propane from a tank in the yard. In the city we get natural gas.
It's also pretty unevenly distributed.
In town, you get 300/30 cable from a local ISP, in some parts of the wilderness you get 768k (nominally) dsl, at our last house which was no less remote than our current house, we had gigabit fios.)
3) You're not going to grow enough food to sustain yourself.
We have several acres upon which we grow food, and someone tends to those acres for several hours a day during the growing seasons.
We get enough food from that for a couple of meals. With some luck, we might be able to produce 30% of the food needs for two or three people.
Farming is a full time job.
Our neighbor is a full time farmer with 75 acres of farm land who raises chickens and rabbits in addition to his vegetables, and he produces enough food to feed ~40 people, and could probably ramp that up to ~100 within a year.
He's been cultivating his farm for decades, and is planning for a societal collapse.
If you're not an experienced, full time farmer working 20+ acres, and including multiple kinds of livestock, your garden will supplement your food needs, not replace them.
We're not so rural that grocery stores don't exist, but you're not going to find much of a selection and you're going to drive a while to get to one.
Amazon's "next day" deliveries will show up within 3 days, unless something goes wrong. Anyone else's shipment should show up within a month, probably, assuming you can even get mail at your house.
(That's right! The postal service won't even deliver to most addresses in the county! The roads are too treacherous for their vehicles.)
When Uber rolled out in town, we had one driver. He was driving for Uber, Lyft, and Ridge Runner (the local door dash knockoff).
Now there are lots more, because the town is full of economic disparity between the remote workers and the impoverished.
I know all the regular dashers by name because I own a restaurant. They're good folks who are not getting paid enough.
Let's talk about bigots, queer people, and people of color!
There's a huge contingent of all three in this particular town. I imagine the same is true in other places, but I haven't lived in that many places.
The queer and trans community in Ellijay in particular is vibrant and thriving and highly visible (thanks in part to the coffee shop my wife operates, which seems to employ half the town's LGBTQ+ community on its own.)
There's a huge (and largely undocumented) central/south american community. The census says we're a pretty white town. My eyes disagree.
We have a "Trump" store and a "Freedom" tavern and frequent failed runs at local office by white supremacists and fascists. We have a right wing militia with their own compound (https://militia.watch/read/tldr/tldr-ghg/) Every political sign has an AR-15 on it. We have people stomp out of our coffee shop on a regular basis because "I have my principals" or whatever.
People are complicated, and if you're going to show up in a town like this you have to be ready to confront that head on. (And that doesn't, however much you want it to, mean with a fist fight.)
We work to meet people where they are and to help bring them up. We've had some successes and some failures.
A short review of the longer article on the militia known as the Georgia Home Guard, based in north Georgia.
(this is not to say that I will put up with an active bigot. When someone says something hateful, they are shown the door. When folks walk in wearing nazi shit, they are shown the door.
I have boundaries I enforce.
But there's some shit that I have had to learn to deal with, so that I can plant the seeds of the bigger message. It's possible, but it is hard work. )
I went to dinner at a local restaurant last night (we have a lot of local restaurants because we're a tourist town without many chain restaurants) and the server knew us by name (go figure, we eat there once or twice a week and it's half an hour closer to our home than any other restaurant) but he knew the folks behind us well enough that he said to them "Hey, I put your maiden name down on the board. I know I know your husband's last name, but I can't remember it right now."
This anecdote is intended to illustrate: It doesn't matter how long you live here, you'll always be seen as a transplant. There's one set of schools in town, everyone goes to school together. Everyone's parents went to school together. Everyone knows everyone back five generations and, while most folks know my wife and I now, we're still "new" 6 years in.
Our neighbors all know us by name. They talk about what we do.
Many of our neighbors are transplants who we brought to town, or who found the makerspace, etc. after moving here.
The ones who aren't... well, they have Opinions about us, and they talk.
So, to summarize:
- People are complicated, and it will take work to accept them and to be accepted by them.
- You're not going to build a self sustaining farm in your spare time
- What are you going to do for work, and how is that going to enrich the community?
- The chains you shop and eat at aren't here, and won't ever be here, and you make someone angry every time you lament the lack of a chipotle or a target
- Expect to get treated like an outsider for a long time.