Same in Greece, the countryside and even the islands are dying or declining. Everyone is moving to Athens or nearby big cities. Even most greek islands have become huge only-summer resorts and a large airbnb, most of their villages are almost empty during the winter. There are various reasons but the most important ones are that a big majority of properties has been bought by foreigners as vacation homes and there is no incentive for locals or other greeks to go there and create businesses for noone mid-winter without schools, doctors, etc. Add to that younger generations don't want to stay and work as farmers, bakers, builders despite the fact that in most of these professions are in real need and can make great money there. People prefer the easy money from airbnb and property selling to foreigners.
That's very sad. Is there any governmental interest in some form of monetary incentive to maintain a particular trade in an area? I seem to recall some Italian towns/villages offering reduced priced housing for those that stay in the area and run businesses locally for a set number of years.
As a foreigner, I very much enjoy holidaying in your beautiful islands but do not wish to destroy their charm with my attendance. You have some beautiful waters.
This tendency started long before airbnb and foreigners started buying a "big majority of properties".
People have been moving to cities for decades now. Many of humanities recent developments make much more sense at scale so people are going to places with that scale. Some prefer a quieter environment and don't move but most people rather have opportunities, jobs, services, etc and all that is made much easier when lots of people are concentrated in a smaller area.
That's true, but at least all these places were kept unharmed and less touristic before airbnb. Each island's tourism was almost limited around hotels and established rental houses before. Airbnb opened up the gates for that extra income for anyone having more than 1 property, these side businesses, building, renovating, managing, cleaning, selling around airbnb. And if you are a rich foreigner, you can buy properties everywhere in the world and keep making money from that local tourism.
It's not about xenophobia, more like fear that the greek landscape we know won't be like this in the future. But greeks are not xenophobic, i would say the opposite. They seem to just enjoy the free money from selling their properties to anyone but don't care about what's left. Islands are getting over-built, Mykonos has become like a tiny Dubai, most popular greek beaches (e.g. Sarakiniko in Milos) are getting constructed with luxury hotels with pools, etc destroying the natural landscape, island villages are getting bought by foreigners who visit Greece for 10 days every 2 or 3 years. What's left behind? Who will work as a regular plumber or baker there? Who will preserve the iconic greek island architecture in future buildings there? The non existent and corrupt construction laws or the foreigners who might not care enough for one of their remote properties (probably just used for extra income via airbnb)?
Not enough software engineers converting to farming? Shocking.
If anything else, for me the main issue in France is the dearth of doctors in rural areas. So even the romantic idea of retiring in quaint village is predicated on not getting sick.
> Not enough software engineers converting to farming? Shocking.
I kinda have to disagree with this. Sure, there's not a lot of software engineers grabbing a hoe and moving to a quiet rural farming village. But oh boy is there a lot of money being a software engineer working on farming.
I'd have to say more software engineers are working in agriculture today than ever before - it's one of the reasons why the rural areas can shrink. State programs for mechanization and increasingly advanced and hyper-specific machines are allowing crops that were labour intensive just a decade ago to be done by a team of 2-4. We went apple picking last year and the field next to us was having its apples harvested by flying drones (which was a real "we're living in the future" moment for us) while a worker sat in a lawn chair nearby reading a book.
Then there's the pushes to remove transport costs and grow closer to the cities. All of our family's lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber come year round from greenhouses on the roof Walmarts, warehouses and other big block stores, just a few blocks away - https://montreal.lufa.com/en/farms. 100% "touch-free" automated greenhouses are being built and have entered full productivity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRts-KOkuM&t=44s. Cheap electricity and thousands of overbuilt (snow load) flat roofs are a good combination for city greenhouses. These "farms" employee directly and indirectly plenty of engineers of all kinds.
Farming continues to be automated. Farms continue to be bought up for way more than their worth (farmland in the U.K. goes for 100-200 times the rental value) as part of wealth concentration.
Yeah. That worked before when most villages had a doctor or a clinic. In France (and my native country too) at least the situation is getting bad. You can look up medical deserts.
Driving to another part also often implies having someone to drive you.
This. I have a colleague living in Orleans. It's a city of a little more than 100k inhabits. She apparently has a hard enough time getting a doctor's appointment that she'd rather come to Paris.
If you live further out in the countryside, it can be a real PITA to find someone.
This. I'm originally from the UK, now in NL and the plan was to retire in France. Being close to a hospital is one requirement since some of these villages are over a hour away.
With that and climate change our plans might be changing
Out of curiosity, where did you plan on retiring to and what preparations would be needed? I drove down France this year over a few weeks in an old camper van during the heatwave (like being in an oven) and it is a truly vast beautiful country. I couldn't possibly decide where to retire there, if I ever had a chance (I won't).
Some countries have really high housing prices and housing scarcity right on a border with another country where this isn't the case. You can get 30-40% differences just by moving a few km on the borders of the Netherlands. The reason this isn't that popular is that by moving like that you get to deal with different jurisdictions and tax systems. Particularly the social systems different countries have are very different. So there's a cost to moving to another country. But it sure is tempting when you realize that what you paid for a small apartment buys you a large house with a garden just 10 km away.
Here in Berlin where I currently live the population grows by a out 50K people a year. There are housing shortages and people are struggling to find a place to live.
However the surrounding Brandenburg area has been depopulating since the wall fell. Lots of little ghost towns there. And it's not even that far. There's plenty of housing available if you can tolerate the inconvenience of a shitty commute.
IMHO the coming revolution of autonomous driving is going to lower the cost and inconvenience of living a bit further away. It enables working or relaxing while you commute. A two hour commute is much less of a problem if you can be a bit productive. And of course you don't have to do that everyday. Lots of people work remotely some or all of the time.
Autonomous driving could also lower the cost of public transport by eliminating the cost of drivers and fossil fuels. Most of the reason of remote villages being underserved by public transport is cost. On demand pickups/dropoffs and more flexible scheduling could further address that. And it's a lot cheaper than commuter rail extensions.
> There's plenty of housing available if you can tolerate the inconvenience of a shitty commute.
I would rather pay for the better location than pay for the larger house. The physical size of my home isn't a large factor in my quality of life. The length of my commute is. Now I was going to write "It's really weird to me this isn't a more mainstream view", but given the data we're looking at, seems this view is absolutely the mainstream.
Longer commutes aren’t just about work, and that time in the car is not free. Kids, kids sports, kids social lives, and kids schooling can leave people trapped in their cars day in and day out trying to reconcile modern urban socialization expectations and the lower property prices they enjoy because of the minor impracticality.
In my specific area the housing price reduction of moving out of the city balances out quickly by the need for a car and/or a second car (our cheap tiny EV works fine for short commutes), particularly if you compare the relative interest rates. I imagine market forces make it so, the financial tradeoffs are reflected in the pricing.
Further: as the only available housing at a low price point collects in smaller towns the impact of borderline purchasers becomes more pronounced. As neighbours I don’t care, but as a parent who has seen kids get an unfortunate personality remodel from a near-peer bad influences and listened to the experiences of my parent friends who live out of town… the contemporary local culture needs to be considered. It’s not necessarily the cozy small town upbringing we expected in olden days, there has been generational turnover.
For most people the size of their home reflects the quality of life. Having separate bedrooms for all children, having a room dedicated to a home office, having an outdoor space to relax, having a dedicated EV charger, having a second bathroom to make the morning more streamlined. To a certain point a large house makes life better. So I understand having a 50 minute commute if that means everything in the house is a better experience.
> It enables working or relaxing while you commute
If everyone is on the road, be it "autonomous" or not, then the net result will be traffic jams. It sounds so idyllic if it's only me but it won't be.
Make public transport more attractive and it could be doable. After all, Europe has spent the last X years trying to get people to use bikes and public transport instead of clogging up roads.
> eliminating the cost of drivers and fossil fuels
By that time, we'll be on fission fuel ... it's just around the corner!
You can get an EV right now and if you have a house in the country side, you can power it almost exclusively using solar power. That would be fusion power from the big fusion reactor in the sky. We've had fission power for about 80 years already.
I actually called out public transport as part of the solution. Autonomous driving makes small buses for uneconomical, remote destinations more feasible. Even just a shuttle to a commuter rail way station would be helpful. The challenge is that these remote areas are depopulating because you can't easily get there. Public transport is amazing but not when it means waiting for a bus for 2 hours that may be delayed by another hour or be cancelled entirely. One plus side of the countryside: not a whole lot of traffic jams there.
> A two hour commute is much less of a problem if you can be a bit productive.
A two hour commute sounds absolutely unbearable to my ears. I guess it makes sense if you are able work for 4 hours daily inside a train or something, but that's already half of the workday, i.e. you might as well just work from home.
I had about a 90 minute commute--each way--for about 18 months. Trust me; it's not nirvana even if it was by rail/subway except for about a 7 minute drive to the station. Wasn't sustainable long-term--which dot-bomb ensured it wasn't. Latterly, I was about 2 hours each way to go into our city office which I really didn't enjoy doing.
If you could reliably work from your autonomous vehicle for two hours you might be able to include that as part of your work day, e.g. 2 hours working on the ride in, 4 hours in the office, 2 hours on the ride home for the full 8 hours. If not, you could fall asleep in the backseat, watch some TV shows, or... you know. Just make sure your windows are tinted. In any case, I'd definitely take a 2 hour "do whatever in the backseat" commute over an hour-long "pay attention to the road at all times" commute.
This is all predicated on true autonomous vehicles though, not the half-baked non-solutions that exist today.
I don’t agree at all. A train ride is not that different from what you’re suggesting a self-driving car will be… and I certainly wouldn’t want to spend 4 hours a day sitting in a vehicle. Even if it was my own first class seat, or even an entire train car.
...is going to take another 20-30 years, if it arrives at all.
It's become very clear in the years since the promise of "self-driving cars in six months!" failed to materialise that the level of computer vision and processing required to operate self-driving cars on arbitrary roads (as in, not in very specific areas in the American Southwest, where the weather is very consistent) is much, much higher than we thought.
Until we can be pretty damn well guaranteed that a self-driving tractor trailer is not going to see a road under construction and either continue going straight through—killing lots of construction workers, and possibly causing a massive explosion if it's carrying fossil fuels—or swerve off the road into someone's house, no matter how poorly the correct lane to drive in is marked...
And that self-driving vehicles will be able to keep in lane at least as well as humans can when there's 8cm of snow on the roads...
We're going to need to accept that the answer to "shitty commute" has to be public transport, or remote work.
It appears that it is turning into a problem in Italy for another reason. In mountainous regions the streams would be maintained by the people owning the land. With people leaving the area the waterways are left unmaintained leaving debris such as large trunks as branches in the water. This effect is compounded by that the land that remains “actively” owned is divided amongst many descendants that can never agree to either fix something or pay to get it fixed.
The consequence of all this is that water flows less freely and that when there is a lot of rainfall it comes not just with water but also large amounts of trees and stones.
There are definitely some data missing, because in Czechia where I live there are some areas on the map with 100% decline in population like Libavá and Březina, which definitely have some population. I don't know about any village that would be totally de-populated. https://obyvateleceska.cz/olomouc/libava/503941
I checked the area around Munich, Germany (where I live).
- one is an actual lake (correct shape) that went down to 0 from a bogus 1
- three are actual forests/parks which may have had some sorts, but 11/16/48 to 0 is a rounding error, but there is no filter for absolute, it technically is -100%...
Something strange happens when people get wealthy and advanced enough. Cost of living rises, workload increases, it becomes unaffordable to have kids. 30 years later, everything is empty.
Places like Australia have plenty of land but, nah, everyone wants to live urban where housing prices are insane or inherited.
Food costs often go down in developed countries, cheaper than developing ones. Maybe they're so low that they can't afford to become farmers anymore? Not enough people buy corn and corn price is so cheap that it gets made into HFCS. But if you can't mass produce cheap corn, you're screwed and get a desk job.
So we have the service economy. Everyone sells services to one another, works from home, makes tons of money. Madrid has top-tier designers, chefs, doctors, moneylenders, nearly every kind of service. All the piles of money in a concentrated place like Madrid makes the whole place overpriced. If you happen to be the best tuna butcher in Western Europe, there's a limited number of places you can work, but many of these specialist jobs are also wfh.
Is there a hack to this though? Can our top tier Spanish pixel artist sell her services to someone in suburban Canada?
I grew up in regional Australia. All of my friends from there moved to the city because they wanted careers. Myself included. My friend who stayed there still works in farming and lives just above the poverty line, and can't compete for a rental so he lives in a shack in a paddock. House prices there also became ridiculous after the pandemic.
Indeed. This is policy. House prices rising generates a lot of money for the government for a lot of reasons so they try to stimulate it, so they can spend more "with less taxing". The biggest factor here is the central bank lending to banks lending you mortgages (so the high house prices effectively become a tax. You will pay either through loan repayment or rental), the second factor is "seignorage" on the total value the central bank loans out (the government can spend effectively 4% of total money lent out loan for free, more if they also cause inflation)
Governments do this in all sorts of ways, including the big one: making this the only real risk-free but effective way to save up and have a bigger pension at retirement (so any change to this system will take a LOT of money out of the pockets of old people, who often can't replace it anymore)
But if you made mortgages either have real risk for banks or stopped funding them through central bank loans ... house prices will crash down. And having inflation is simply a choice. We could choose otherwise.
The problem with changing this is that it will require a permanent reduction in government spending or a permanent (big) raise in tax. Both are non-starters.
What this does over time is it makes labor that has low productivity, such as farming, less and less realistic if you want a decent life. It is a ratchet that forces the population to make more and more money over time ... or face destitution. It's been an extremely powerful way for countries to get rich.
I think the benefits will be short lived. The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance). This is a terrible outcome for society. I'm not convinced high house prices generated a lot of wealth for governments. Government debt is higher than previous decades, and government asset ownership is lower. I think this has been a bad strategy.
People move to where they can make a living. Globalization has largely killed farming as a viable livelihood (in most of the EU at least), it's simply not profitable enough unless you have a massive amount of land/cattle or have invested heavily in automation (usually both). Without that important sector, it's doubtful the trend will reverse unless cities become literally unlivable or there's some kind of miracle in transport technology.
For Finland it seems that it is not the farming automation that kills these places. It is the deindustrialisation. Places die as the jobs die. And jobs are killed by big factories being closed leading to all other services starving. Globalisation is the killer, but via factories not farms.
The trend will reverse once we have enough people in positions of power both able to recognise and willing to admit that remote work is, for at least 75% of office jobs, at least as good as onsite work. (Not "without tradeoffs", just "at least as good, overall".)
Sadly, this is going to have to be at least a generational change, as the current people in power are deeply entrenched in the mindset that "managing people" means "ensuring butts are in seats", and that they are neofeudal lords overseeing their techno-serfs, which they can only feel good about if they can go aggravate them in person.
I'd love to have statistics on how many people can not work remotely because their partner can't work remotely. Maybe starting with how many jobs are office jobs that don't require f2f would be a good sample, but I've never seen such numbers.
It is my hope that increased connectivity and options to study, work, and interact with other people from anywhere will partially revert this trend, but honestly, it seems inevitable.
Part of my family hails from a small Mountain Village which used to be quite alive thirty years ago, but now the majority of the population is above 60, and there's only a handful of children. Small towns have many positive sides, but network effects are too important for people.
City states. The borders are administrative and hard to change, so people living in the "suburbs" live not only in a different city, but a different state.
They are not. For Finland it is factor of 5 to 10. So you can get houses for something like 20 to 50 thousand. Or lot less. Same for row houses or "condos". Sometimes these places don't even sell as there simply isn't demand.
You didn't understand, I was referring to those "depopulated" places as well. So even thought a population of an area decreased prices don't show that.
I take it you don't understand that nobody wants to live there - so considering it as a housing option is a joke. But ok, sorry for making a shortcut in my prev comment.
The point that I and the other commenters are making to you is that house are cheaper in less attractive places. I presented an extreme, but it's true across the spectrum.
It's true you have to pay for renovation. It's not true that it's "more than it's worth", and the proof is that people are buying those knowing about the renovation costs.
It’s supply and demand. Unless the supply significantly outnumbers demand then land owners can increase the cost to extract all consumer/producer surplus.
yes, but it's still rough. I live 200m from the border of a european capital with good road access towards everything, and even our community is continually shrinking.
This will possibly help region-central cities keep a small proportion of the jobs that have moved to the biggest national/international cities. It's not going to help rural villages.
This is how communist countries managed to make educated professional urbanites live more impoverished lives than American burger flippers. By prioritizing "equality" to the point that you destroy your society's productivity and make everyone's life worse. Would not recommend.
Of course you’re now living through the capitalist dystopia where prioritizing “productivity” is making everyone’s life worse than said communist professional urbanite, but with the added benefit that burger flipping is coming back as an employment sector for recent indentured graduates / serfs.
At least in my capitalist dystopia I'm not forced to share my bathroom and kitchen with Ivan next door, like Soviet college professors did.
If you think anything in the first world constitutes indentured servitude, I have some really bad news about how you decide what your job is in the USSR. Hint: you don't.
In my country part of the problem is taxation. Real estate gains are not taxed so we have instantiated a mini feudal system where the land owning class need not work, and many chase speculation over productive labor, and since this group is rather large this is exacerbating the demographic problems we already have with labor supply. Further it is driving a feeling of unfairness among the rural population that leads to political instability. Finally it is leaving some areas simple in lack of maintenance.
Speaking as an Italian: during the pandemic and the immediate post-pandemic there was a huuuge trend of people moving back to the South because now with remote working they could effectively bring their job with them.
Then the Government did little to nothing to encourage that, and at some point the trend essentially died.
Needless to say, a lot of couples could have moved to their areas of origin, have the support of the extended family (grandparents) and that would have likely helped with children (particularly with couples yearning to have more children.
It was another lost occasion to revitalise some of the smaller towns.
Meanwhile The Netherlands is bright green due to its suburbanization policies of the 1970s. Let’s spread people out instead of building out our cities…
I don't think what works in a small and flat country with a famously productive agricultural sector can work equally well in the mountains of Spain and Italy.
If you look economically how that works (ie. tax haven + oil + "buying the population", ie. the extremely rich pay for that for not great reasons) you will see that, first, it's not sustainable and, second, it can't be replicated elsewhere (for one thing, it requires the country to be small). I mean there are places it can be replicated, say Norway, but for the vast majority of countries this is not possible.
here in Nova Scotia there are many rural comunities with NO children and where all of the adults are over 40.
many small rural homes are torn down as it reduces the tax/maintenance burden on the owners who are city dwellers now, and use a travel trailer to visit.
there are comunities on the map that no longer physicaly exist, except for perhaps one empty house, or literaly nothing recognisable as a town remaining, just named streets on a map, and trees where they, apairently once were.
our city (singular) is booming, and the larger towns within the magic 1 hr drive from the city are also booming, but much of the rural landscape is bieng abandoned.
but perversly, the final phase of twinning the trans canada hyway through New Brunswick has revealed an unknown phenominon where it is impossible for people to drive for 6 hours through scrub spruce and not stop and build a Wallmart, and so the trans Canada is slowly becoming a very long, very narrow strip mall, with sections several hundred kilometers long through ontario and quebec finnished, no homes or schools or hospitals mind you, just endless retail oportunities
Europe has been ruined, since USA interfered militarily in Europe.
Since 1900, major U.S. military interventions in Europe have included full-scale combat operations during World War I (1917–1918) and World War II (1941–1945), as well as targeted Allied troop deployments in Archangel and Siberia during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920). Throughout the Cold War, U.S. forces executed non-combat and advisory operations, such as supplying West Berlin during the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949) and providing direct military aid during the Greek Civil War (1947–1949). In the post-Cold War era, the U.S. engaged in several NATO-led Balkan campaigns, including airstrikes and peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), a 78-day air campaign and ground deployment in Yugoslavia and Kosovo (1999), and a brief disarmament operation in North Macedonia (2001).
Same in Greece, the countryside and even the islands are dying or declining. Everyone is moving to Athens or nearby big cities. Even most greek islands have become huge only-summer resorts and a large airbnb, most of their villages are almost empty during the winter. There are various reasons but the most important ones are that a big majority of properties has been bought by foreigners as vacation homes and there is no incentive for locals or other greeks to go there and create businesses for noone mid-winter without schools, doctors, etc. Add to that younger generations don't want to stay and work as farmers, bakers, builders despite the fact that in most of these professions are in real need and can make great money there. People prefer the easy money from airbnb and property selling to foreigners.
That's very sad. Is there any governmental interest in some form of monetary incentive to maintain a particular trade in an area? I seem to recall some Italian towns/villages offering reduced priced housing for those that stay in the area and run businesses locally for a set number of years.
As a foreigner, I very much enjoy holidaying in your beautiful islands but do not wish to destroy their charm with my attendance. You have some beautiful waters.
This tendency started long before airbnb and foreigners started buying a "big majority of properties".
People have been moving to cities for decades now. Many of humanities recent developments make much more sense at scale so people are going to places with that scale. Some prefer a quieter environment and don't move but most people rather have opportunities, jobs, services, etc and all that is made much easier when lots of people are concentrated in a smaller area.
That's true, but at least all these places were kept unharmed and less touristic before airbnb. Each island's tourism was almost limited around hotels and established rental houses before. Airbnb opened up the gates for that extra income for anyone having more than 1 property, these side businesses, building, renovating, managing, cleaning, selling around airbnb. And if you are a rich foreigner, you can buy properties everywhere in the world and keep making money from that local tourism.
Were they actually "kept unharmed"? If many people are moving out, services start to wither, too. Which pushes even more people to move out.
Sure, bringing in tons of tourists where there were initially none is going to change a place. But isn't it a way to keep it alive, even if different?
I think the situation is different from places where people actually want to live but are pushed out "by the rich" (tourists or second-home owners).
It is sad what you mention.
The commoditisation, clustering and gentrification of landscape and living is world-wide phenomenon.
At Corsica FLNC fought with bombing against hijacking of landscape by vacationers. But xenophobia solves nothing.
Revolution? Slow collapse? Some way out of the cities and back to the countryside? Idk. Time will tell.
It's not about xenophobia, more like fear that the greek landscape we know won't be like this in the future. But greeks are not xenophobic, i would say the opposite. They seem to just enjoy the free money from selling their properties to anyone but don't care about what's left. Islands are getting over-built, Mykonos has become like a tiny Dubai, most popular greek beaches (e.g. Sarakiniko in Milos) are getting constructed with luxury hotels with pools, etc destroying the natural landscape, island villages are getting bought by foreigners who visit Greece for 10 days every 2 or 3 years. What's left behind? Who will work as a regular plumber or baker there? Who will preserve the iconic greek island architecture in future buildings there? The non existent and corrupt construction laws or the foreigners who might not care enough for one of their remote properties (probably just used for extra income via airbnb)?
Not enough software engineers converting to farming? Shocking.
If anything else, for me the main issue in France is the dearth of doctors in rural areas. So even the romantic idea of retiring in quaint village is predicated on not getting sick.
> Not enough software engineers converting to farming? Shocking.
I kinda have to disagree with this. Sure, there's not a lot of software engineers grabbing a hoe and moving to a quiet rural farming village. But oh boy is there a lot of money being a software engineer working on farming.
I'd have to say more software engineers are working in agriculture today than ever before - it's one of the reasons why the rural areas can shrink. State programs for mechanization and increasingly advanced and hyper-specific machines are allowing crops that were labour intensive just a decade ago to be done by a team of 2-4. We went apple picking last year and the field next to us was having its apples harvested by flying drones (which was a real "we're living in the future" moment for us) while a worker sat in a lawn chair nearby reading a book.
Then there's the pushes to remove transport costs and grow closer to the cities. All of our family's lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber come year round from greenhouses on the roof Walmarts, warehouses and other big block stores, just a few blocks away - https://montreal.lufa.com/en/farms. 100% "touch-free" automated greenhouses are being built and have entered full productivity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRts-KOkuM&t=44s. Cheap electricity and thousands of overbuilt (snow load) flat roofs are a good combination for city greenhouses. These "farms" employee directly and indirectly plenty of engineers of all kinds.
Clarkson’s farm did have a section about this. That said, you know what I meant.
I have several burnt out friends who went “farming” and I assure you, programming combines and drones is not the thing they meant by going away.
Farming continues to be automated. Farms continue to be bought up for way more than their worth (farmland in the U.K. goes for 100-200 times the rental value) as part of wealth concentration.
True, but that is not the problem.
> So even the romantic idea of retiring in quaint village is predicated on not getting sick.
Grew up in a village. What you do is... drive to another village / town. There are always doctors to be found - and less queues than in big cities.
Yeah. That worked before when most villages had a doctor or a clinic. In France (and my native country too) at least the situation is getting bad. You can look up medical deserts.
Driving to another part also often implies having someone to drive you.
This. I have a colleague living in Orleans. It's a city of a little more than 100k inhabits. She apparently has a hard enough time getting a doctor's appointment that she'd rather come to Paris.
If you live further out in the countryside, it can be a real PITA to find someone.
This. I'm originally from the UK, now in NL and the plan was to retire in France. Being close to a hospital is one requirement since some of these villages are over a hour away.
With that and climate change our plans might be changing
Out of curiosity, where did you plan on retiring to and what preparations would be needed? I drove down France this year over a few weeks in an old camper van during the heatwave (like being in an oven) and it is a truly vast beautiful country. I couldn't possibly decide where to retire there, if I ever had a chance (I won't).
Just hire a large muscular guy from the banlieues to drive you around in your Maserati.
Ideally one that is also a doctor.
Some countries have really high housing prices and housing scarcity right on a border with another country where this isn't the case. You can get 30-40% differences just by moving a few km on the borders of the Netherlands. The reason this isn't that popular is that by moving like that you get to deal with different jurisdictions and tax systems. Particularly the social systems different countries have are very different. So there's a cost to moving to another country. But it sure is tempting when you realize that what you paid for a small apartment buys you a large house with a garden just 10 km away.
Here in Berlin where I currently live the population grows by a out 50K people a year. There are housing shortages and people are struggling to find a place to live.
However the surrounding Brandenburg area has been depopulating since the wall fell. Lots of little ghost towns there. And it's not even that far. There's plenty of housing available if you can tolerate the inconvenience of a shitty commute.
IMHO the coming revolution of autonomous driving is going to lower the cost and inconvenience of living a bit further away. It enables working or relaxing while you commute. A two hour commute is much less of a problem if you can be a bit productive. And of course you don't have to do that everyday. Lots of people work remotely some or all of the time.
Autonomous driving could also lower the cost of public transport by eliminating the cost of drivers and fossil fuels. Most of the reason of remote villages being underserved by public transport is cost. On demand pickups/dropoffs and more flexible scheduling could further address that. And it's a lot cheaper than commuter rail extensions.
> There's plenty of housing available if you can tolerate the inconvenience of a shitty commute.
I would rather pay for the better location than pay for the larger house. The physical size of my home isn't a large factor in my quality of life. The length of my commute is. Now I was going to write "It's really weird to me this isn't a more mainstream view", but given the data we're looking at, seems this view is absolutely the mainstream.
Longer commutes aren’t just about work, and that time in the car is not free. Kids, kids sports, kids social lives, and kids schooling can leave people trapped in their cars day in and day out trying to reconcile modern urban socialization expectations and the lower property prices they enjoy because of the minor impracticality.
In my specific area the housing price reduction of moving out of the city balances out quickly by the need for a car and/or a second car (our cheap tiny EV works fine for short commutes), particularly if you compare the relative interest rates. I imagine market forces make it so, the financial tradeoffs are reflected in the pricing.
Further: as the only available housing at a low price point collects in smaller towns the impact of borderline purchasers becomes more pronounced. As neighbours I don’t care, but as a parent who has seen kids get an unfortunate personality remodel from a near-peer bad influences and listened to the experiences of my parent friends who live out of town… the contemporary local culture needs to be considered. It’s not necessarily the cozy small town upbringing we expected in olden days, there has been generational turnover.
> parent who has seen kids get an unfortunate personality remodel from a near-peer bad influences
Scary stuff, I would love to hear more. May I ask what country is this?
For most people the size of their home reflects the quality of life. Having separate bedrooms for all children, having a room dedicated to a home office, having an outdoor space to relax, having a dedicated EV charger, having a second bathroom to make the morning more streamlined. To a certain point a large house makes life better. So I understand having a 50 minute commute if that means everything in the house is a better experience.
> It enables working or relaxing while you commute
If everyone is on the road, be it "autonomous" or not, then the net result will be traffic jams. It sounds so idyllic if it's only me but it won't be.
Make public transport more attractive and it could be doable. After all, Europe has spent the last X years trying to get people to use bikes and public transport instead of clogging up roads.
> eliminating the cost of drivers and fossil fuels
By that time, we'll be on fission fuel ... it's just around the corner!
You can get an EV right now and if you have a house in the country side, you can power it almost exclusively using solar power. That would be fusion power from the big fusion reactor in the sky. We've had fission power for about 80 years already.
I actually called out public transport as part of the solution. Autonomous driving makes small buses for uneconomical, remote destinations more feasible. Even just a shuttle to a commuter rail way station would be helpful. The challenge is that these remote areas are depopulating because you can't easily get there. Public transport is amazing but not when it means waiting for a bus for 2 hours that may be delayed by another hour or be cancelled entirely. One plus side of the countryside: not a whole lot of traffic jams there.
> A two hour commute is much less of a problem if you can be a bit productive.
A two hour commute sounds absolutely unbearable to my ears. I guess it makes sense if you are able work for 4 hours daily inside a train or something, but that's already half of the workday, i.e. you might as well just work from home.
I had about a 90 minute commute--each way--for about 18 months. Trust me; it's not nirvana even if it was by rail/subway except for about a 7 minute drive to the station. Wasn't sustainable long-term--which dot-bomb ensured it wasn't. Latterly, I was about 2 hours each way to go into our city office which I really didn't enjoy doing.
If you could reliably work from your autonomous vehicle for two hours you might be able to include that as part of your work day, e.g. 2 hours working on the ride in, 4 hours in the office, 2 hours on the ride home for the full 8 hours. If not, you could fall asleep in the backseat, watch some TV shows, or... you know. Just make sure your windows are tinted. In any case, I'd definitely take a 2 hour "do whatever in the backseat" commute over an hour-long "pay attention to the road at all times" commute.
This is all predicated on true autonomous vehicles though, not the half-baked non-solutions that exist today.
I don’t agree at all. A train ride is not that different from what you’re suggesting a self-driving car will be… and I certainly wouldn’t want to spend 4 hours a day sitting in a vehicle. Even if it was my own first class seat, or even an entire train car.
> the coming revolution of autonomous driving
...is going to take another 20-30 years, if it arrives at all.
It's become very clear in the years since the promise of "self-driving cars in six months!" failed to materialise that the level of computer vision and processing required to operate self-driving cars on arbitrary roads (as in, not in very specific areas in the American Southwest, where the weather is very consistent) is much, much higher than we thought.
Until we can be pretty damn well guaranteed that a self-driving tractor trailer is not going to see a road under construction and either continue going straight through—killing lots of construction workers, and possibly causing a massive explosion if it's carrying fossil fuels—or swerve off the road into someone's house, no matter how poorly the correct lane to drive in is marked...
And that self-driving vehicles will be able to keep in lane at least as well as humans can when there's 8cm of snow on the roads...
We're going to need to accept that the answer to "shitty commute" has to be public transport, or remote work.
It appears that it is turning into a problem in Italy for another reason. In mountainous regions the streams would be maintained by the people owning the land. With people leaving the area the waterways are left unmaintained leaving debris such as large trunks as branches in the water. This effect is compounded by that the land that remains “actively” owned is divided amongst many descendants that can never agree to either fix something or pay to get it fixed.
The consequence of all this is that water flows less freely and that when there is a lot of rainfall it comes not just with water but also large amounts of trees and stones.
I imagine this happening in many places.
There are definitely some data missing, because in Czechia where I live there are some areas on the map with 100% decline in population like Libavá and Březina, which definitely have some population. I don't know about any village that would be totally de-populated. https://obyvateleceska.cz/olomouc/libava/503941
It's a bit weird and maybe more complicated.
I checked the area around Munich, Germany (where I live).
- one is an actual lake (correct shape) that went down to 0 from a bogus 1
- three are actual forests/parks which may have had some sorts, but 11/16/48 to 0 is a rounding error, but there is no filter for absolute, it technically is -100%...
- bit further out is another lake with 14 to 0
Classic null being replaced by 0.
If you just want the map and not this ever scrolling cinematic experience
https://cdn.correctiv.org/deployed-apps/CE_2026_population_m...
Thank you. This makes it easier to try and find somewhere quiet to live!
It's insane to see the UK still growing. Despite all of our problems, it's still a nice place to be
The area on the map that is green corresponds to the blue banana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana
Something strange happens when people get wealthy and advanced enough. Cost of living rises, workload increases, it becomes unaffordable to have kids. 30 years later, everything is empty.
Places like Australia have plenty of land but, nah, everyone wants to live urban where housing prices are insane or inherited.
Food costs often go down in developed countries, cheaper than developing ones. Maybe they're so low that they can't afford to become farmers anymore? Not enough people buy corn and corn price is so cheap that it gets made into HFCS. But if you can't mass produce cheap corn, you're screwed and get a desk job.
So we have the service economy. Everyone sells services to one another, works from home, makes tons of money. Madrid has top-tier designers, chefs, doctors, moneylenders, nearly every kind of service. All the piles of money in a concentrated place like Madrid makes the whole place overpriced. If you happen to be the best tuna butcher in Western Europe, there's a limited number of places you can work, but many of these specialist jobs are also wfh.
Is there a hack to this though? Can our top tier Spanish pixel artist sell her services to someone in suburban Canada?
I grew up in regional Australia. All of my friends from there moved to the city because they wanted careers. Myself included. My friend who stayed there still works in farming and lives just above the poverty line, and can't compete for a rental so he lives in a shack in a paddock. House prices there also became ridiculous after the pandemic.
Indeed. This is policy. House prices rising generates a lot of money for the government for a lot of reasons so they try to stimulate it, so they can spend more "with less taxing". The biggest factor here is the central bank lending to banks lending you mortgages (so the high house prices effectively become a tax. You will pay either through loan repayment or rental), the second factor is "seignorage" on the total value the central bank loans out (the government can spend effectively 4% of total money lent out loan for free, more if they also cause inflation)
Governments do this in all sorts of ways, including the big one: making this the only real risk-free but effective way to save up and have a bigger pension at retirement (so any change to this system will take a LOT of money out of the pockets of old people, who often can't replace it anymore)
But if you made mortgages either have real risk for banks or stopped funding them through central bank loans ... house prices will crash down. And having inflation is simply a choice. We could choose otherwise.
The problem with changing this is that it will require a permanent reduction in government spending or a permanent (big) raise in tax. Both are non-starters.
What this does over time is it makes labor that has low productivity, such as farming, less and less realistic if you want a decent life. It is a ratchet that forces the population to make more and more money over time ... or face destitution. It's been an extremely powerful way for countries to get rich.
I think the benefits will be short lived. The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance). This is a terrible outcome for society. I'm not convinced high house prices generated a lot of wealth for governments. Government debt is higher than previous decades, and government asset ownership is lower. I think this has been a bad strategy.
People move to where they can make a living. Globalization has largely killed farming as a viable livelihood (in most of the EU at least), it's simply not profitable enough unless you have a massive amount of land/cattle or have invested heavily in automation (usually both). Without that important sector, it's doubtful the trend will reverse unless cities become literally unlivable or there's some kind of miracle in transport technology.
For Finland it seems that it is not the farming automation that kills these places. It is the deindustrialisation. Places die as the jobs die. And jobs are killed by big factories being closed leading to all other services starving. Globalisation is the killer, but via factories not farms.
The trend will reverse once we have enough people in positions of power both able to recognise and willing to admit that remote work is, for at least 75% of office jobs, at least as good as onsite work. (Not "without tradeoffs", just "at least as good, overall".)
Sadly, this is going to have to be at least a generational change, as the current people in power are deeply entrenched in the mindset that "managing people" means "ensuring butts are in seats", and that they are neofeudal lords overseeing their techno-serfs, which they can only feel good about if they can go aggravate them in person.
I'd love to have statistics on how many people can not work remotely because their partner can't work remotely. Maybe starting with how many jobs are office jobs that don't require f2f would be a good sample, but I've never seen such numbers.
It is my hope that increased connectivity and options to study, work, and interact with other people from anywhere will partially revert this trend, but honestly, it seems inevitable.
Part of my family hails from a small Mountain Village which used to be quite alive thirty years ago, but now the majority of the population is above 60, and there's only a handful of children. Small towns have many positive sides, but network effects are too important for people.
For me towns have more perverse networks though. You meet more people but the connections are more shallow (as an adult).
I am really torn about where to raise my kid as it really seems one has to choose between opportunities and social/family life.
1. The phenomenon exists, but what is the problem?
2. Surely "municipality" does not mean the same thing in different countries.
Odd, why has Hamburg and Berlin stayed the same population in the last 30 years?
City states. The borders are administrative and hard to change, so people living in the "suburbs" live not only in a different city, but a different state.
Missed the other part. Why does the density doesn't not improve in the city states?
More and more people want to live in the city, as you can see in the skyrocketing rents, but they do not want to
- build higher
- build more dense (in particular, keep the green areas)
Yet still a lot of houses is expensive as h...rent/buy - doesn't really matter.
They are not. For Finland it is factor of 5 to 10. So you can get houses for something like 20 to 50 thousand. Or lot less. Same for row houses or "condos". Sometimes these places don't even sell as there simply isn't demand.
Houses are expensive in places where everybody wants to be.
You didn't understand, I was referring to those "depopulated" places as well. So even thought a population of an area decreased prices don't show that.
That's not really true? Housing in depopulating / depopulated areas can be easily 5-10x cheaper than in premium metro regions.
In picturesque locations, there's upward price pressure because well-off urbanites sometimes buy vacation properties, but that's hardly a new thing.
I take it you've never heard of the 1 euro houses in rural Italy then...?
I take it you don't understand that nobody wants to live there - so considering it as a housing option is a joke. But ok, sorry for making a shortcut in my prev comment.
The point that I and the other commenters are making to you is that house are cheaper in less attractive places. I presented an extreme, but it's true across the spectrum.
These 1 Euro houses are scam. You have to pay for renovation more than it is worth.
It's true you have to pay for renovation. It's not true that it's "more than it's worth", and the proof is that people are buying those knowing about the renovation costs.
It’s supply and demand. Unless the supply significantly outnumbers demand then land owners can increase the cost to extract all consumer/producer surplus.
The government still has to maintain the infrastructure, whilst building more where the people have moved to.
How about the other half?
Anthropologists announce that human populations tend to congregate towards urbanity. Next sports.
yes, but it's still rough. I live 200m from the border of a european capital with good road access towards everything, and even our community is continually shrinking.
Here's how you can stop it: no national licences to distribute power, telecommunications, medicine, fuel, etc. Even some software.
Then you will have to have regional duplicates of each.
Stuff will cost more though.
This will possibly help region-central cities keep a small proportion of the jobs that have moved to the biggest national/international cities. It's not going to help rural villages.
This is how communist countries managed to make educated professional urbanites live more impoverished lives than American burger flippers. By prioritizing "equality" to the point that you destroy your society's productivity and make everyone's life worse. Would not recommend.
Of course you’re now living through the capitalist dystopia where prioritizing “productivity” is making everyone’s life worse than said communist professional urbanite, but with the added benefit that burger flipping is coming back as an employment sector for recent indentured graduates / serfs.
Would also not recommend.
At least in my capitalist dystopia I'm not forced to share my bathroom and kitchen with Ivan next door, like Soviet college professors did.
If you think anything in the first world constitutes indentured servitude, I have some really bad news about how you decide what your job is in the USSR. Hint: you don't.
And urban civilizations eventually collapse?
What, no "film at 11" or "Later tonight, Kojak"?
This would definitely be in the apres-Kojak, just before sign-off part of the evening.
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What is the actual problem with this development?
In my country part of the problem is taxation. Real estate gains are not taxed so we have instantiated a mini feudal system where the land owning class need not work, and many chase speculation over productive labor, and since this group is rather large this is exacerbating the demographic problems we already have with labor supply. Further it is driving a feeling of unfairness among the rural population that leads to political instability. Finally it is leaving some areas simple in lack of maintenance.
Speaking as an Italian: during the pandemic and the immediate post-pandemic there was a huuuge trend of people moving back to the South because now with remote working they could effectively bring their job with them.
Then the Government did little to nothing to encourage that, and at some point the trend essentially died.
Needless to say, a lot of couples could have moved to their areas of origin, have the support of the extended family (grandparents) and that would have likely helped with children (particularly with couples yearning to have more children.
It was another lost occasion to revitalise some of the smaller towns.
Good time to go? Better and more affordable life?
The life quality is definitely better. The affordability hardly so, unless you can secure your income streams.
Meanwhile The Netherlands is bright green due to its suburbanization policies of the 1970s. Let’s spread people out instead of building out our cities…
I don't think what works in a small and flat country with a famously productive agricultural sector can work equally well in the mountains of Spain and Italy.
Northern France isn’t that mountainous and is way, way more urbanized than The Netherlands.
If you look economically how that works (ie. tax haven + oil + "buying the population", ie. the extremely rich pay for that for not great reasons) you will see that, first, it's not sustainable and, second, it can't be replicated elsewhere (for one thing, it requires the country to be small). I mean there are places it can be replicated, say Norway, but for the vast majority of countries this is not possible.
If you think this is bad, there is no such map of North Africa or Turkey, but the situation there is much worse.
Lay fiber, strenghten 5G coverage, allow work from home. Problem solved.
half have fewer... and.. half have more?
The population in general is larger which is why depopulation of towns is interesting
here in Nova Scotia there are many rural comunities with NO children and where all of the adults are over 40. many small rural homes are torn down as it reduces the tax/maintenance burden on the owners who are city dwellers now, and use a travel trailer to visit. there are comunities on the map that no longer physicaly exist, except for perhaps one empty house, or literaly nothing recognisable as a town remaining, just named streets on a map, and trees where they, apairently once were. our city (singular) is booming, and the larger towns within the magic 1 hr drive from the city are also booming, but much of the rural landscape is bieng abandoned. but perversly, the final phase of twinning the trans canada hyway through New Brunswick has revealed an unknown phenominon where it is impossible for people to drive for 6 hours through scrub spruce and not stop and build a Wallmart, and so the trans Canada is slowly becoming a very long, very narrow strip mall, with sections several hundred kilometers long through ontario and quebec finnished, no homes or schools or hospitals mind you, just endless retail oportunities
Europe has been ruined, since USA interfered militarily in Europe.
Since 1900, major U.S. military interventions in Europe have included full-scale combat operations during World War I (1917–1918) and World War II (1941–1945), as well as targeted Allied troop deployments in Archangel and Siberia during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920). Throughout the Cold War, U.S. forces executed non-combat and advisory operations, such as supplying West Berlin during the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949) and providing direct military aid during the Greek Civil War (1947–1949). In the post-Cold War era, the U.S. engaged in several NATO-led Balkan campaigns, including airstrikes and peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), a 78-day air campaign and ground deployment in Yugoslavia and Kosovo (1999), and a brief disarmament operation in North Macedonia (2001).
I would to like to know which of its interventions you're talking about. People don't normally complain about the help on WW2
These were all good things though? What are you're trying to get at? That Europe would have been better off under fascist or communist rule?
When did the USA interfere militarily in Europe?
Would Europe have been better off under Nazi Germany?
Is that what you’re saying?
Yes. This is basically true but unclear the causal link to the true problems.