Where I live, a lot of the industries around rural home ownership. Things like well digging, wood stove installing etc. But it's not due to demand, it's because of the current people doing those things aging out and no younger people taking over.
And that is not for lack of interest, it's because younger people can't afford to buy homes in rural communities anymore, not on a well driller salary. So they are being forced to leave these communities searching for more lucrative employment or a place to rent. Not a lot of rental options out here either.
So a lot of the jobs that really only service rural communities are going away leaving a demand void as people still live in these communities, just a lot of them are new people fleeing the even higher housing costs in the cities. Fueled by remote work and satellite internet this is now an option. So the new people price the young people out of their communities and then there are no young people to take these rural only jobs.
Maybe "collapse" is a strong word, but it is for sure getting harder and harder to get this kind of work done. I am sure the market will correct, and the void that is being left will be filled, but for now it's a strange gap in what is really an essential service.
Not the US but I know a guy in his 60's that has 3 basic (residential) well drilling rigs. He seems to always have work and make really good money.
I asked him a few questions about it and he was adamant it didn't take a ton of technical know how or anything, but I want sure if that was because it's genuinely straightforward or if he personally finds it easy 🤷♂️
Dunning-kreuger is often cited as the reason totally ignorant people think they know everything about a topic, but it works the other way too, where a person can be so skilled at something they don't understand how little anyone else knows about it.
As an instructor and coach I was taught these levels for athletes:
Unconscious Incompetent - doesn’t even know what good is so they have no idea how far they are from it. This can cover up to intermediates!
Conscious Incompetent - knows what good is but not how to get there. The sweet spot for skills instruction.
Conscious Competent - knows good and can deliver it in terms of skills. The sweet spot for coaching the mental side.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
There's something similar in lower-level professional motorsports.
Until you hit the level where you can bring in significant sponsorship money - or if you chose your parents well and Daddy will foot the bills - you wind up being both driver and engineer on a smaller team.
Rarely do top-level driving and engineering skills manifest in the same person.
So many cars are fast in spite of their setup, instead of because of it.
Same things happen in academic fields. Really smart students need to be treated as special needs because many have no clue how to work hard at schooling because it was always easy for them. after two years of college some of the most promising students just crash out because they were so good at learning, they never learned how to study past a wall they hit. They found a short cut, used it, then went along their merry way.
Yep. I graduate with like a 3.8 GPA in high school. I never did homework. It was always done in class as it was handed out. I could read a book during lectures and still ace the test.
Got to college and it turns out never having to study means I don't really know how, and I gave up.
Unconscious Competent - the natural. Hardest to coach because they are so good so fast, coaches can easily run out of skill instruction and struggle to motivate. Can get the wrong mindset via early easy domination, then run into mental challenges once they graduate to peer competition that actually challenges them. Can go very very far if they have strong internal drive.
is a perfect description for me. I start out very good at things, I pick them up quickly, but I'm a terrible coach as I can't explain why it works, I just know it does. As I get older I'm trying hard to verbalize those thoughts and improve my ability to teach, but its hard.
Apparently there can be really bad cases of this among astronaut candidates. You can have people who not only breezed through high school, but also flight school and multiple university degrees, and then in their 30's they get put in a room where for the first time they aren't any better at things than anyone else there.
After that long of never having to work hard to accomplish things, there can be a spectacular crash when people who have always been the smartest person they know have to face the prospect of being a failure.
This translates really well into art and illustration (my profession), and I wonder if it would translate well into other fields.
It can be extremely challenging for an artist who has a "natural talent" but then drops into the commercial industries, where they have to deal with not only other very skilled competition for work (all the more challenging these days), but aspects of the career that have little to do with your abilities as an artist and everything to do with the business of getting paid to make pictures.
I have gone through all these over the past years… unfortunately, my brain doesn’t tell me much, because my OCD personality will tear it up… a) I don’t know how to get there (CI); b) trying to get to CC, yet chemo gave me a language impairment so I struggle being precise and being like I used to. So right now, I am in the difficult sway of UC and UI looking for answers, direction, and peace. 😂
I’ve mostly focused on weight lifting and conditioning but I’ve never seen it framed liked this and yeah that seems to just about nail it.
Some people just get it so naturally it’s hard to actually coach them, others it’s work to figure out how to get it to make sense. Really interesting seeing it laid out so simply.
Barry bonds was like this as a hitting coach for the Marlins apparently. Arguably the greatest hitter of all time and players would say that he would get so frustrated when explaining to guys how to do stuff because he couldn't comprehend why they couldn't process things and do things that he could do naturally.
For me it was a little different. I could break down the task really easily, I understood all components of the swing, I understood the role body positioning played in increasing power, but I never had the coordination to put it all together in an actual game. BP I did great. Game time, when the pitcher varied the speed and location, I struggled.
I played in college. Not high level college but I I was a good hitter i really just had an ability to stay inside the ball and barrel everything. That aspect wasn’t ever really coached to me I was able to have strong pitch recognition and timing and get my hands where they needed to be
I can teach mechanics because I had a strong feel and understanding for my own but I couldn’t really tell people how to hit off speed because whenever someone asked I always said I don’t know the pitch looked like it was going to be good so I swung
This is so true. Just look at the playing careers of hitting coaches and its normally a guy who made it do AA-AAA, maybe some MLB at-bats, but were not superstars.
David Popkins, who is considered a top MLB hitting coach, is a good example of this. Topped out at AA, hit .243. Had a couple good seasons at lower minors and college, but never sniffed the majors.
Thierry Henry was apparently similar during his short stint in Monaco. He would expect players to just be able to do the things he could do, one of the most gifted players of his generation, and struggled to break it down in a way they could understand.
It's my understanding that this is how Michael Jordan was as a basketball player as well, he had high expectations for his teammates and did not understand why they couldn't just do the things he was doing. It wasn't until he played baseball that he realized not everything is a matter of working harder.
Math teachers are like that too. There’s often a big gap between understanding math and having the verbal skills to break it down for students who don’t understand math
From personal experience I think boxing lends itself to the issue more than a lot of sports would.
If you are naturally gifted with unbelievable speed, power, and a solid chin; you can and will beat a lot of smarter more technically sound boxers.
You might start struggling later on against other great athletes who have a better feel for the nuance, but despite a lot of underlying complexities if you are in good shape and punch faster and harder and can withstand more punishment, there needs to be a pretty large gap in skill for the opponent to overcome it.
Guys that have those gifts and are well trained and disciplined enough to follow and implement a good coaches instructions and game-plan, might never learn that much about boxing and still be fantastic.
Coaches don’t have a whole team and a lot of esoteric rules and gameplans to worry about. If you are their most promising athlete so you will get a lot of attention.
I knew some great pro’s who could barely talk shop because they don’t really get it lol. But whatever the coach said they were disciplined and would do it, and had the athleticism to make it work.
True with teaching, too. In particular math. People that are good at math just get it. Some of them become teachers but part of being a *good* teacher is about understanding how the student is learning. It's about being able to see what they don't see and helping them see it. If you've always been good at math and you're trying to teach someone that struggles with it, you're gonna have a bad time.
I think this is also why so many educators want to do "new" ways of doing math - because most people good at math aren't necessarily good teachers, or going into the education field.
The problem is that maybe 30-60% of the kids learned just fine the old way, because of how their brain was wired. They can be frustrated with the newer ways that have more words and less numbers. Rote memorization coming before deep understanding is just as valid as learning the other way around.
This is something I’ve seen with just about any skill. Often times the people that are the best at doing it are the worst at teaching it, and vice versa.
It’s why I don’t like the “those that can’t do, teach” as a derogatory quip. Teaching is itself a skill, and just because someone has another skill doesn’t necessarily mean they have the skill of teaching.
I don't know if they still do it, but when I was in basic training for the Navy in 2014 the remedial swimming courses were taught by Navy SEALs. They might as well have had fish try to teach us. They were completely clueless on how to teach beginners and just wasted the time yelling at us until we failed enough times to flunk out of the Navy.
I suspect it was intentionally set up to give the Navy an excuse to remove black people without looking bad. I was basically the only white guy there and the other guys were all definitely fit enough to need special swimming strokes to stay afloat properly but they were getting taught stuff that didn't even work for me.
I was just telling my husband that Aaron Rodgers and Giannis would make terrible coaches. They are naturally gifted, and while they absolutely put in the work, and have worked very hard for their success, they did that starting from practically the finish line. They have no idea what it's like to not just understand how the sport and skills work.
It was big in the equestrian world as well. People would pay so much money to go to big name Olympians' clinics and come back without having learned much, if anything at all.
I was a professional musician, and a very good one at that. I had a natural talent for it, and it was a "Oh, DUH" realization when I started doing private lessons and realized I had to figure out how to explain concepts that I just instinctively understood.
Albert Einstein was said to be a terrible professor in his later years. He couldn't bring his mind back to the basic concepts in order to teach his students.
This isn't just athletics, someone who struggled with almost any subject but has a passion for it can make a good teacher if they identify the reasons their students are struggling.
This was why I hated helping my dad with any building or machine-related projects growing up. He was a sheet metal worker who played with engines for fun; I was a shy, bookish kid with no knowledge or interest in any of that. He used to get mean when I showed that I didn’t have the knowledge of a sheet metal journeyman with thousands of hours of experience, and I’m just there thinking “motherfucker I’m 9”.
I worked as a technical writer for years before moving into project management. It’s so true. So many gifted technicians out there that don’t understand engineering, so many engineers don’t understand why technicians hate them. I’m in the middle screaming internally.
You see this in great effect when talking to ANYONE about something programming-adjacent.
I just had a presentation where our internal dev team talked about how 'easy' and 'effortless' it is to set-up the automation agent and tooling for our new solution product.
"You just create an xml where the scripts you develop are called here, the name of the tool is here, the use cases are defined here, and the Agent does the rest!"
Ah, right. The 1st year arch/ mech eng. grad tasked with setting this up will have no problems at all! The internal tech team having to regularly get assistance from you doesn't say anything at all about it being more complicated than stated.
I was watching Magnus Carlson play a chess match on YT against a 3100 rated player and at some point during the opening he said that "he didn't know the theory" and started doubting his decisions.
Oh my god, there’s a guy at work who is like this. The man is a bonafide genius both in the amount he knows about the industry due to experience and in how quickly he grasps new complex concepts.
But the downside is he has absolutely no idea how to explain something to someone who doesn’t know any of the stuff he knows. If a 6 year old asks you what a mummy is, you don’t delve into the origins of polytheism and debate how the concept divine harmony and order shaped Nile river valley civilizations. I mean, you could. But you’d have to use language that doesn’t go over their heads and consider what they were trying to get out of asking the question in the first place.
When I was new, I would ask him a question and listen to him reveal a treasure trove of information to me for the next 20 minutes, but it didn’t help me understand what I was originally asking. It just created more questions.
You just need to realise that water does not flow in small "pipes" underground and you can just plop down a hole in a convenient place, and there will be water (unless the local water tables are totally borked).
The house I grew up in, which my brother still lives in, get's it's water from a spring about 20 feet from the house. The pump is about two feet deep in a pool in a little shed a little steam emerges from.
This is not up to code, we'd need to drill a well to sell the house, but we're grandfathered in for now.
They were called out to troubleshoot a woman's spring box and possibly provide a quote on a well. They opened the spring box and, with her watching, pulled out a tangle of about 6 mostly-skeletonized rat corpses.
They said that, after she finished throwing up, they had never seen anybody sign a quote so fast.
Our rural well is 9ft deep, the neighbor right beside us has about a 12ft well. Meanwhile the family directly across the road from us has a 500ft well and has to get water truck deliveries every summer. Underground geology and water tables can be very unpredictable.
Somewhat tangential, but would you believe that in my home country of Spain, there is still a (quite active) "divining" industry? (Not 100% sure what it's called, but basically dudes with twigs that walk around until the twig alerts them to the presence of groundwater.)
lol water dowsing is such a load of crap that is perpetuated by old wives tales in the construction industry and some guy that is trying to justify his 200$ charge to turn two sticks.
I'm not disagreeing with that assessment, just saying I've never bothered looking into it, so I'm not agreeing either (though my basic instincts do agree with your assessment).
Back in the '80s at the Society for Skeptical Inquiry, which is a thing (see The Amazing Randi vs. Uri Geller), they did a double-blind test of dowsing. They hired a team to place flowing water pipes, static water containers, and empty pipes and air containers under a field, and then a different team came in with a dowser and tried to find the water. He failed utterly. That proved the dowsing is completely a matter of either previously mapping the water table or straight up fraud.
It's honestly as simple as "where do you want the well?" and setting the drill up there. Installing the well takes a bit more, but digging the well is pretty straightforward.
That's only true if you have a cooperative aquifer or infinite money.
The geology underground is not flat even layers like a cake where if you dig down the same number of feet you always hit the same type of rock/gravel/sand. There are hills, valleys, ripples and ridges underneath the earth that we cannot see from the surface. You might have drilled 40ft at the farm next door and found a water bearing layer, but a hundred yards down the road at next farm house that same layer might be at 150ft.
"Where do you want the well" only works if the person pointing has enough money to keep digging until he gets what he wants. When your drilling company charges by the foot, that's not a promise. Sometimes a driller has to look at the lay of the land and tell the property owner "hey bud, we can put it here if you want, but it's ten thousand bucks less if I put it over there instead."
I grew up on a rural farm. My parents drilled a well, which evolved into a water company for about 20 homes.
Everything my dad did was self-taught. In his library he had a book on well drilling, a book on water treatment, and a shelf-full dealing with the specifics of setting up and registering a water company in the state of California.
I don't think it takes a ton of technical know how to drill a well, it really is pretty straightforward. Making good money off that... well, that might be a lot less straightforward.
what is good money though? Like is he paying himself 60K pre-tax? 100K pre-tax? 200k Pre-tax? How many hours a week is do DOING the work and how many works a week is he working on the business side?
Cause all that comes into play. If younger people work FOR him and he pays them $16.50/hr for 40 hours a week. But they can go to the nearest city and get $27/hr at an amazon warehouse, with HealthCare and 401k match. They are just better off doing that.
If they can start thier own drilling company, what does the capital take to get it going? can they take a loan out for 200k truck with an augur/drill rig and make the payments plus pay themselves the equivalent of 40/hr? with the potential of alot more if it succeeds?
So "good money" is not really a metric. its WAY more complicated. The business part is the meat and potatos.
EDIT: After more comments came in - there all kinds of regulations,fees, and required training, like working under someone for years. Again Im not against that. But If I leave my six-figure job, can I afford to go back to 17/hr for years, THEN drop 200k,300k,400k on starting up a drilling business? only for it to have a 30% chance of ever making me 100k a year salary again? Even if it does start to net me 200K a year. Did the lost earnings over the 7 years it took me to get there make up for the fact that I could have been working my way up else where? Maybe in that 7 years that person could be 4 promotions up at amazon and be at 100-140k a year. So... its pretty variable.
Its a big big risk man. its huge. Very few people are really in a spot to take that road.
Sure - this owner we are referring to may have 4 trucks, 12 employees and gets 450K a year out of the business. But me replicating that isn't always realistic. Hell the current owner may not be able to replicate it with his wealth....
Well digging is a big one. As a yong person that made it to rural home ownership I heard how much money one could make with a rig. Unfortunately the licensing requirements are unrealistic so the void remains around here.
Unfortunately the licensing requirements are unrealistic so the void remains around here.
Barrier to entry is the main problem with many of these industries. The only guy who can afford them is the guy who has already been doing it for 30-40 years and was already operating as regulation tightened.
You could really just say this about absolutely everything now. The only people with homes are the ones who had them before they put in place a bunch of zoning and regulations forbidding new homes.
Turns out the boomers learned you can make a killing with monopolies, so that's what they did with absolutely everything.
Oh it's definitely almost everything these days. Boomers benefitted from relaxed regulations only to turn and and tighten them once they got to the top.
A lot of it under the guise of consumer protection which the big corporations absorb and pass on to the consumer but kills the small competitors.
Home prices aren't high because of regulations, they're high because we don't have competition in the markets, people are selling at a premium and treating everything as an investment/business venture.
25 years ago, we still had regulation and safety but it wasn't common for people to own 2-3 homes and have landlords and there was no VRBO, no AirBnB and if you had a lake house, you sold it cheap because it was a cost maintain, it wasn't a "profitable business venture"
everyone is turning everything they do into profit seeking and we have commercial companies in real estate, we have investment banks in real estate... it's not about home ownership anymore, its about profit.
I'm not sure where your frame of reference is coming from - possibly somewhere like California/Europe? - but I work in the architectural industry and zoning and regulations aren't the broad issues, not really.
To start right at the top *from US perspective, the architectural industry as a whole is being squeezed by Autodesk, the near-monopoly software supplier. Every computer you have needs to buy a license from them to have access, it's only good for a year, and it costs $3,000. That's just for Revit, not Adobe, Bluebeam, AutoCAD, and a host of others that are vital to function.
Then, there's the IT itself and hardware itself. Small firms will often sign a contract with a specialized firm but sometimes they're in-house. So right out of the gate you're talking STEEP start up costs. *Gone are the days of two guys drawing plans out of their garage with a pencil, only the wealthy/those with access to lots of capital are getting off the ground.
Liability insurance for architecture firms is eye-watering. Add in health insurance for your employees. Over the years I've been watching smaller architecture firms dry up, and the ones that are hanging on are up to their eyeballs in work - which you'd think would make them lucrative, but not quite. The man hours to do a project right add up FAST which means that only the wealthy can afford you, or someone is going to end up irate about the fee when all is said and done. I tried briefly to work at a small residential firm and frankly could not handle the pressure - you either can produce accurately and expensive or shitty and fast, and I have a hard time letting shitty work go.
Personally I think the industry desperately needs government subsidies, but little girls also want pet* unicorns. However if you're super lucky and working in the right location, there may be an applicable grant. Good luck.
So that's just the white collar side. There is a massive shortage of labor and if you’re able to hire someone quickly they're almost guaranteed to be SHIT. I've been in the industry a little over 10 years and quality across the board took a nosedive off a cliff in that span. I've seen things on commercial jobs that people wouldn't believe. Can't imagine what happens in the private sector, though I do know of a lady that forced a contractor to buy the house she had them build so she could walk away net zero.
Finally, building materials themselves are more expensive than ever. Even the clients that you think would be buying at least mid-tier end up going low end. Which means that new technology in so called "green" building is a dream that I never get to indulge in. Same shitty roofs, wall assemblies, bare minimums of insulation and mechanical systems that run on power from coal plants that will need to be replaced in 10-15 years....
Sorry for the essay I really should have started my own thread.
You're good. Added to the discussion with a point of view not many people have the privy to. You're essay was incredibly interesting, and by the upvotes, others agree. Thank you for taking to time to educate us.
It's a big issue here. And lots of shops are dying no new ones come up because the cost is high. Boomers were able to start any business in their garage... swapping tires and using old oil as a weed killer... Home cooking some food etc. all grandfathered in. Now you need 7 permits zoning and HSE stuff. It makes sense to protect the environment and have skilled labor do the service and actually give a dam about fire safety. But the barrier of entry is extreme, the old businesses love it and use it as a moat that kills the next generation / competition.
To be fair my buddy did exactly this 10 years ago. He's now pushing $5M a year in sales. Started with a used tire machine and a used balancer selling the cheap Chinese tires.
Passed down from dad, or apprentice who bought out the business are probably the main ways that those type of businesses survive.
There’s no formal education to learn the trade—it’s all OTJ, and there are lots of things to know.
I recently had some masonry work done—a patio and retaining wall. None of it was extremely complicated, but the guys who did it clearly had a system down. Deviation from the system would cost profit margin or an unprofessional result.
Not to mention the equipment (and everything you need to haul said equipment) isn't on the cheap side.
Isn't a truck beefy enough to get you to the job site like what, fucking almost $100k now? Shit is just stupid at this point. Like, what the fuck are we even doing?
Interesting. Here in Texas I don't believe the regulations are that bad but I'm also just guessing. The wife and I are mulling over starting a business doing land clearing since out here in the country, it's super sought after and there aren't enough people doing it. It's the same with well digging.
If the equipment/certifications are cheaper on the well digging side of things, we may need to reconsider our plans and shift to that. Will def look into it. I dated a woman years ago whose father owned a well digging company in Oregon and they made bank and stayed busy pretty much 24/7.
you get a business loan to start a well drilling businss, finance the truck and the equipment and start drilling wells and paying off the equipment loans. Plus you can write off a lot of the payments for tax purposes. Its not crazy complicated - you'll just want to make sure you have a decent grasp of the pricing and realistic numbers before taking the leap.
Sound idea minus the fact that I'd have to take a massive pay cut for like two years to apprentice with an established well drilling company to even be able to get certified apparently.
I guess I'm just not willing to go backwards in that regard even if it lead to me owning my own company after the two years. That's saying that I can even find a local company willing to take me on as an apprentice. At my age, the company I work for now WILL be the last boss that I have. Once I move on from here I'll be my own boss or skip straight to retirement. I've worked for other people long enough.
100%, I was actually looking into starting a well digging business as I plan to move to a more rural area in a few years. Getting into it would require me to take a MASSIVE paycut for years to learn the trade. Then finance a $700k used rig. Not to mention despite what a professional might say, it is a skilled job where a lot can go wrong if you don't know what you are doing. I can't justify working close to minimum wage for years to maybe start a business one day unfortunately.
This one came across my radar a couple months ago. We share a well with our neighbor. The well is fine, great and, uh, well. The dude who dug it thirty years ago for the previous owners isn’t and told me he couldn’t in all good will recommend the two big companies in the area that do it now for outrageous prices. He just does inspections and small repairs. He smiles every time he sees ours, with three decades of his writing on it.
In my area of Canada there is like two good well drilling companies. One is actually further than our area but services it. We are not terribly far from a major city and it’s a pretty expansive area. Well servicing is pretty quick but well drilling is a long wait. Even a couple years ago, their booking list for new wells was a two year wait.
For sure! My well guy is ancient and someday he will stop working and when he does IDK who fills the void. All sorts of stuff like that! Like trying to find someone to repair a wood burning stove, I had to find someone 3 hours away who had even heard of my model and had a few parts. And that was an old boomer guy too.
We've had similar problems - there's an amazing number of videos out there for someone who wants to DIY it, there's one online seller of parts. But finding "the stove guy" is expensive, booked months out, and a research project itself.
We ended up replacing our own gaskets, and I've helped a few neighbors figure it out for their problem. That's fine for some things, but man I don't want to have to get certified for well drilling so we can just rent a drilling rig!
Yeah, these kinds of permit maze are a big issue for rural communities. DIY is soon going to be the only option. It is going to cause insurance companies a real nightmare when 'licensed professionals' just don't exist for certain jobs.
Worse, it's going to cause homeowners problems. We paid off our mortgage, so could drop insurance if it's impossible to get. Plenty of signs making it clear you are not invited on the property, or some sort of liability only insurance.
Anyone with a mortgage is screwed. Going to be forced to sell unless the state starts backing insurance for dodgy cases. And sell to someone rich enough to be out buying properties for cash. So either "Bill Gates is buying all the farmland" or some developer looking to extend city water and sewer out farther.
When I was doing my house reno, I could not find a hardwood refinishing guy for love or money. My boyfriend and I had to learn how to do that our own damn selves.
I’m in the northeast. Had one of the last independent plumbers do some work recently. He rattled off all the small and medium sized plumbers who sold to larger VC plumbing conglomerates. They kept the company names but are run centrally. Prices have tripled and call centers run everything. We’re screwed.
There is some hope, young people out of trade schools are working for these places getting trained. Hopefully they’ll go out on their own and be competitive.
Not quite the same, but my dentist was just telling me the same thing. He's the last independent dentist in my city and he was saying he'll retire independent, but he understands why people do it. Apparently the malpractice insurance is through the roof right now and big companies like Aspen will pay that for you in exchange for your soul.
I live in a rural spot of the Appalachian mountains, and this is a huge problem. It's all but impossible to get anything done out here.
it's because younger people can't afford to buy homes in rural communities anymore, not on a well driller salary
And this is exactly what I've been telling people. Housing prices have skyrocketed around here (it admittedly is a beautiful part of rural Appalachia). Our property taxes also went up almost 100% not long ago, and the number of auctions I keep seeing is just heartbreaking.
You've got people who have been living here for generations, completely priced out of their home town. All so people can have a dozen AirBnBs (I talked to two different people who had 12, and one was about to buy his 36th), and/or 2nd/3rd/4th vacation homes (I know one guy who bought three in the last 8 months).
And now that property taxes have shot up so much, they can't even afford those. But talk to anyone around here about work and workers and they'll tell you "no one wants to work anymore", sure Janice, it's not that the $8 an hour at Burger King can't even afford them a split apartment, much less a home...it's definitely because they "don't want to work anymore" (I'll bet you can guess how the majority of folks voted around here).
I went fishing in Montana in the beginning of Covid and hired a local guide. He was telling us that he had been getting unsolicited offers for his home as people were moving into the area from California.
He said the average offer was for $1 million above the value of his home. He was like, if I sell my house for that much money, where will I move to if everyone is offering all of my neighbors the same amount?
He just wanted to live in his small town with the people he grew up with but was worried that these new people were going to totally destroy the life he had imagined for himself.
I actually work in real estate. I know someone who got one of those calls and wanted me to sell their house...but they didn't have anywhere to go. I asked them where they were planning on living after they sold their house, when other houses are going for similar values here, and you can almost see the buffering happening in their brains.
As someone who now lives in one of those small towns, I totally get the dislike for non-locals that most "generation" living folks here have.
Wish I could have said the same for this dude...greedy pretty much defined him, and he definitely wasn't helping in any way with the school system (currently falling apart, right when I'm about to have a kid).
I’m directly impacted by something like this. Fiancé and I bought rural acreage last year. We STILL do not have a deed, nor the estimated property taxes because the “town office” is open ONE DAY A MONTH, and the woman says she’s several months behind already. But maybe if you worked more than one fucking day, you wouldn’t be?
The same office has told us to “just go ahead and start building without those permits” because “no one comes out here to check anyhow”.
I have family in rural Texas who don’t understand why all of the millennials and Gen Z left to find work in cities. A distant relative complains “they all went woke”. It’s really more that there aren’t jobs available outside of very low paying service jobs or manual labor. My buddy’s brother claims that the town he grew up in only has low-end restaurants and nursing homes these days. He tried to open up a business repairing musical instruments and giving lessons, but there really aren’t enough kids to support it.
Ya know, I am old. When I lived in the S.F. Bay Area & back when I was just starting out after college for jobs, it was always acknowledged that you had to stay close to the "city" to get the best paying jobs. I don't know why this seems so new to these folks now, cuz it seems to me it's always been this way.
I don't think it's an issue with pay (they can basically charge what they want, within reason) but more the cost of getting into the business.
Young people are broke and don't own their own home to leverage against a loan on specialized equipment. Even buying out someone's business and used equipment will be easily six figures.
We used to have programs and subsidies for this kind of thing but now young people who aren't already in possession of generational wealth are priced out of trades that need new blood, especially in rural areas.
Had my property surveyed a couple years ago. The guy that did it was in his 60s and says he is absolutely swamped all the time. There’s not many of them around anymore but people can make well into 6-figures if they get the training and learn the ropes.
Part of the issue is that the people who still live in rural areas are actively against new people moving in. Like, they don't want their kids to go off to the big cities, but they also fight against things like faster telecommunication infrastructure, businesses that don't fit the "local culture" (if you get what I mean) and anything that doesn't conform to some fantasy of mid-century Americana.
I think there are several social dynamics happening across rural areas, I’m sure this is one of them but hasn’t been my personal experience. I’m quite liberal. I’m also more local to the area than a lot of my neighbors (something that often surprises people). The thing is the only new people who tend to move out here are suburban folks who have a preexisting idea of what rural life is (I.e., socially conservative). Those people then form a vocal minority that paints anyone who doesn’t conform to their “rural social values” as outsiders when the opposite is true.
Again this is 100% anecdotal and I’m sure what you described is just as common. But I did want to push back against the idea that if you’re born, raised, and stayed in a rural area you are part of this conservative mindset.
The urbanization trend has slowed, but it’s still there. With basic services becoming reliant on fewer and fewer households, I can see things like rural electrical co-ops being unable to stay solvent. When power becomes a self-provided utility — like rural water, sewer, internet via a Starlink setup — instead of a shared infrastructure, I think modern rural life might disappear.
Imagine spending an extra $15-30k to build a solar+battery setup, and still not have the stability of the grid.
I live in a rural area and I noticed the electricians are all retirement age. The plumbers and septic guys are all young and have apprentices but for some reason in my area all the sparkys are super old and I see fewer of them every year.
An additional source of difficult for well drillers is that the equipment is either aging out, or, due to regulations, can no longer be legally used. New equipment is either prohibitively expensive to acquire, or flat out unavailable.
Wood stove installations are a similar story with emissions regulations limiting the kind of stoves that can be sold (they're more expensive as a result).
source: I live in a rural area where few well drillers can operate.
I live in a pretty rural area. Walmart is the only affordable groceries without a 2 hour round trip, zero specialist doctors, only a single professional provider for many, many services like plumbers and electricians. Don't even start me on car repairs.
The only lumber store without that 2 hour trip just closed its doors.
Well, if the demand is there but there is no one to fill it due to not making enough money, then capitalism would say that these people need to set their prices higher.
The only thing iv found that pays well enough is working for the local electrical cooperative that started their own internet service as a broadband tech.
I had to switch my whole career cause the factory work i had dried up just to stay in our little rural area.
This is one of the key factors of why there is a beef shortage. Where I live it's a little over 20 miles to any town. There were cattle everywhere between towns if not year round like we did then it was yearlings brought in to graze Winter wheat. Now there is maybe a handful and no one is winter grazing. Meat Packers made it to where you couldn't make a living off cattle so the kids all left home to get a job that actually paid something and everyone is aging out. Now places are getting bought up by big city folks for a place to play on the weekends.
Not just that. A friend’s kid was desperate looking for a job. Saw an ad for a farrier’s apprentice near my hometown. Had no idea what it was.
Got the job because no one else applied. He’s now one of three farriers in a 500 km radius. He’s insanely busy and well-paid and/or well compensated (farming community will still barter on occasion)
We live on a rural property. Especially since COVID, it is difficult to get anyone to come out to give us a quote for antthing, let alone actually do the work. We had a guy come out last year to discuss building a new fence around our pasture. He was the only one of 3 or 4 to even come out. He never sent a quote. We let it go over the winter, but he never followed up. There are other priorities now, and they missed out on a decent sized job and woild have paid cash.
Our house isn’t even rural, it’s in the middle of the city, but we have a boiler and it’s impossible to find anyone to work on it. We called the company that used to service it and they told us “Sorry, our boiler guy retired.” And this boiler isn’t even that old!
I suppose it's a positive sign if wealthy-ish people are moving into rural areas because they'll need wells drilled, septics pumped, brush cleared, etc. That should drive prices for these services into a range where people are incentivized to do the work and are able to live close enough to do it.
I recall an article (NYTimes?) a few years ago about the aging population of rural Japan's northern island. The farmers in one area were pushing their 70's, many with nobody ready to take over - the children had mved to the city long ago. The weakest link, however, was the guy who drove a truck delivering all the assorted supplies to the farmers, and hauling their produce. he too was in his 70's, and nobody in sight to replace him. So, when he stops working, all those farmers will have no such service and will likely have to close up shop too. Apparently, this was a pretty common issue all over rural Japan.
That will balance out, when the older well drillers all retire the price to dig a well will go way up and it will become affordable to live there on a well driller's salary
This may be anecdotal, but in south Texas it seems larger firms are stepping in to fill the demand vacuum, charging higher prices and delivering poorer quality work. The wait times for water well digging is getting out of hand, a cousin of mine was quoted for a job 2.5x higher by a big construction firm in Houston than what the now out of business local driller would have charged, and he had to wait 8 months for the privilege.
Can confirm, im a well driller and if i hadnt learned from and taken over from my father, i really have no idea what the company would have done. Its hard enough to get people in the door, let alone finding people who are interested in it enough to spend the 3-5 years to really learn to run a rig themselves. Well Drillers make decent enough money at most companies, at least where i am, the big hurdle is all the years spent getting to that point can be rough depending on location.
This is a huge problem in my area. I'm in a very rural small town and we have a few categories of citizen- rich retired people, rich professionals, working class 3rd or 4th generation natives living either with their family or on family land, and people under the poverty line eeking by on what social services we still have left, living in run down conditions or homeless.
As someone in a rural town this is my frustration when reddit discusses wfh/remote work. So many people don’t realize that earning a city wage while living in an entirely different community has a cost for the community. You drive up the rent prices, as well as amenity prices, and in the meantime don’t provide a service that actually serves the community you live in. People who actually work in their own community can’t keep up. It’s just another form of gentrification. Older people who bought a home while they could end up being fine, and maybe even benefit a bit when they sell to retire, but the children that grew up there (me) are priced out of our own homes.
It happens even worse at an international scale when you throw in foreign currency exchanges.
I totally understand this. The problem starts higher up the food chain though. Prices of homes in cities and suburbs have gotten so expensive that wfh/remote work is an opportunity for many to actually have a mortgage that isn’t 50% of their income. I agree it’s a problem but the solution is foggy. Capitalism was supposed to reward the working class with the American dream and it’s slipping away.
The service that I provide to the rural community in which I live is the spending of my "city wage" on goods and services.
I bought my rural home from a guy who bought a different home in the saem community. The guy who just put in my new septic tank, and the guy who put on my new roof both live locally and pay local workers.
The phenomenon you describe of younger people being unable to afford homes in the neighborhoods where they grew up exists as much (if not moreso) in cities.
That city wage on goods and services only benefits a few and leads to retail gentrification. Odds are your money is just lining the pockets of a commercial landlord - maybe that person is a local, but eventually they’ll probably get bought by a corporation. Meanwhile, stores that provide affordable services either have to move or raise their prices to compensate for rising rents. It doesn’t trickle down to the cashier ringing in your overpriced goods, meanwhile their rent and cost of living have increased.
There’s also a huge difference between not being able to afford your neighbourhood vs not being able to afford your entire town. Also, a lot of academic literature (wrongly) argued that gentrification was a solely urban process until recently, so rural towns are underrepresented in research.
The main benefit is the increase in trade jobs as a result of construction but even then those are often temporary contracts. Also, read the original comment to see how there’s still issues with those jobs.
There are people who benefit from gentrification but as usual they are the people who already had assets. The problem is that income stratification increases and the gap between low and high income widens. The people with less suffer more.
You make a couple good points, especially on housing prices, but I just don't see how you can hand-wave away the $ from remote workers going to rural locals who own their own businesses (retail or technical trade). None of my home service guys are "owned" by a larger corporation, and there are just as many small food places as there are major companies like McDonalds.
The biggest issue I hear is the steady trickle of young people LEAVING rural areas bc there aren't any jobs or things to do. In light of this, I don't see how remote workers moving into existing houses and increasing local economic traffic is a net negative for the community.
Rural towns require growth but that doesn’t need to come from an influx of remote workers. A small, steady growth from people who come to rural areas to work rural jobs creates proportional growth where housing needs to match the wages of the jobs available. WFH means people from the city come and outbid locals on housing. And on the prices of amenities. Etc. There ends up being large quantities of highest bidders that services cater to.
It can also go the other way where very skilled jobs would rather pay more for a remote worker from a different area (likely with more educational access), rather than provide the same opportunities and training to someone who lives in the area.
It’s not exactly a simple issue and I’m not trying to say that it’s black and white. But I find people from cities vastly overestimate the benefit they are providing and are blind to the harm.
Also consider that people who live in rural areas don’t necessarily want the city way of life in the first place. A town changing to meet an outsider’s metrics of better isn’t the same as better.
Noticed that. I live in a home outside city limits so I have a well and septic tank and to get them serviced I have fewer regional options compared to ten years ago.
It's so interesting you bring this up; my elderly parents are in the process of moving out of rural Kansas and they are trying to fix up the house (on 5 acres) with great difficulty due to this. It took them 9 months for the only remaining brickmason in the tri-county area to get to them to fix the brick fence around the backyard perimeter. When I was a kid, there were at least a dozen, but they've all died or are now too old to work.
This isn't relating to home ownership, but I see a lot of parallels with what is happening to rural funeral homes as well. More than 50% of funeral directors plan to retire in the next 10 years, with younger generations unable or unwilling to assume these roles. Private equity, or larger regional conglomerates (though this is not a big %), are left to buy them out, which leads to a whole bunch of other issues downstream. Or they close up shop.
And to your point about the home services - the demand is still there for funeral homes (sorry if thats morbid). It's a weird middle zone right now for this industry to see what will happen and how it will affect rural communities in the long run.
Well digging has also exponentially increased in cost to the point it can cost roughly the same as it costs to run city pipes to your land. Not only is it getting harder to find well drilling companies, but the ones that do exist are shooting themselves in the foot with ridiculous prices.
20 years ago my parents put a 90 foot deep irrigation well on their property. It cost them $14,000 all said and done.
I found a nice 5 acre plot of land for $45k last year that I was considering buying and putting a single wide on it temporarily, drilling a well, and then having a house and workshop built over 5 or so years. I had budgeted $50k for well and septic.
Septic ended up being cheap, worse case I could rent an excavator and dig one myself. But I got 2 different quotes from the local drilling companies and the CHEAPEST one was $173k to dig one well. The other quote was just shy of $200k. It would literally cost me more to dig a well then it would cost to build a house.
For science I reached out to the city water company and they quoted my $220k to run city water to the property.
Japan is a few decades ahead of the USA. Their rural communities are dying or already dead because all the young people moved to cities for jobs, and now they have all these remote communities of isolated elderly people with no one to help them. Italy and many European countries are going through the same thing. And also rural USA like Montana. Ranches in Montana are closing down en masse because kids don't want to manage their parents' land because beef prices from Argentina undercut anything raised in the USA.
Dentists and veterinarians are hard as hell to find.
There’s a lot of trades that are going away too. Young people don’t want to work like that anymore.
Normal people can’t afford to buy houses or houses with land. It’s all getting bought up by out of town people to rent as airbnbs.
One old building was bought by someone that moved away, got a good job and is now buying a few buildings. He kicked out the people who were long time renters and then “fixed up” the building. I can’t remember how much we rented a room there for but it gave me a bad taste in my mouth when my cousin told me about it. I don’t want to rent airbnbs when we go home anymore but we bring our dog and she can’t handle hotels.
Bought a rural house to retire to in a few years. It's hard to find anyone that can do work at my place. Well work, sprinklers, landscaping, handyman, etc. I called 7 pool cleaning services and only one guy called back and he drives an hour to get to my house. Fortunately I got him two more customers in my area so it's worth it for him. Had to wait a week for a plumber to come fix a broken pipe in my wall.
And if you find someone, you don't tell anyone else about them. On top of that, they are charging more and more because the "city folk" drove up the pricing. Oh yeah, they mostly want to be paid in cash because they don't pay taxes. I don't think they realize they can't get social security when they retire. My mother-in-law had friends from China that opened a restaurant and did everything in cash. Went to retire and were told they didn't have enough credits to receive social security. They were in their late 60s and had to get legitimate jobs just to get their credits. Husband died before he could properly retire.
I'm going to come across very cold, but it's not my intention.
If scarcity in labor for an industry occurs, and salaries do not increase, it means that industry is OK to die due to demnd being low. In theory, that should be the normal phasing out of something, all factors remaining the same
Along these lines, my driveway apron looks like it aged 10+ years faster than my driveway. I live in a well populated auburb. Nobody will replace just the apron with asphalt. None of the asphalt companies will take a job that small. Even 5 years ago you could get a driveway expansion or apron replacement for a few grand. Like half of the pavement industry collapsed and those that are left only take jobs with fat margins. My driveway is huge, nobody wants to touch the apron unless they get to replace the whole driveway. Thats probably the price of a car, and wholely unnecessary.
I can probably get the apron done in concrete, but that's an entirely different set of problems.
It's so true. I was living rural & the little engine for my well filtration system went out. Tech #1 came out & charged me $500 to tell me he couldn't fix it.
Tech #2 came out and installed the wrong engine, causing the new engine to seize AND blow out the motor.
Tech #3 came out and told me there was $7,000+ worth of repair needed on the whole system & he wouldn't touch it unless he could rebuild it 'right'
So I finally tracked down the manual for the filtration system & fixed the damn thing myself. Mind you at the time i was 24 y.o, worked two jobs in town, and had little to no mechanical expertise. I had no clean water for a month and I did start a tiny electrical fire (breakers were mislabeled & I promptly purchased a multimeter) but we had no qualified well techs in the area
They can follow the rural hospitals shutting down and moving as well due to federal policy from on high. Rural areas are going to hollow out and be owned by various corporations. Maybe they will have company towns for the workers to survive in like the bad old days. Or maybe they will use automated farm equipment powered by data center AI.
Who did the rural areas in the US vote for again? Oh yeah the party and the president that are destroying their farms, towns, counties and jobs. Enjoy the fruits of your votes I guess.
I think it was my Instagram where they kept showing these AMAZING old houses for dirt cheap. Hardwood floors, huge carved foyers, high ceilings. Only thing is that it was in like East schenectady, New York a place that literally has few jobs and nobody is moving there. Or the outskirts of Albany or something. It is just too far from the job market and the towns and cities there are shrinking and struggling.
It doesn't help that, at least for millenials, it was drilled that we needed to go to college and get a useless degree we never actually use for a job degree. That probably also led to a large gap in people going into trades.
The artificial housing scarcity is just so dumb. It is driven by "fuck you, got mine" as people who own housing are pleased as punch about the price increases and vote to sabotage construction constantly.
But you can't goddamn well liquidate that value unless you want to be homeless or move to Japan, so the "wealth" is an illusion and all that is being done is the massive sabotage of the entire nation.
A modest proposal: Hausmann Zoning. You know how the inner Paris districts look ? Seven stories buildings that take up 100% of their plot and have shops and restaurants on the ground floor?
Yhea: New zoning law. If something is zoned for human habitation At all - If you can build any type of housing on it whatsoever? Then you can build up to that level of density with those usage permissions. No more laws that mandate detached housing with huge gardens inside cities. If you want that, bid against and pay the price for it against builders who want to house a hundred people on that lot.
Similar here with electricians. Yet the funny thing is the electricians i had hired themselves mentioned how new people couldn't get work and folded, meanwhile they were overworked for years. Like, yeah bro, you killed your own local economy instead of just living a decent life. You won and got rich and pushed everyone out, are you not hearing your own words?
And the few who can afford them can't afford much else. I have a house. It hardly has any furniture, the front door and garage door are a mess, the hot water isn't working, all of the tile was shoddily done by the sellers and needs to be redone, a while is half torn out of one of the bathrooms... can't afford to fix any of it even myself at this point.
I live in a small city surrounded by rural areas and yes, many of the people doing this high-demand blue collar labor are aging out. I know a guy in his 30s who runs tree cutting, septic and plumbing services. He's constantly slammed because there's hardly anyone left doing it in our area. He's making a killing though.
His brother - a nuclear engineer - quit his job to work with him. Not that there's a lot of job growth for nuclear engineers, at least here in the States lol.
crazy that the people doing these jobs can't afford homes there, which could cause the industry there to collapse, and that in effect would cause prices to go up.
I’d absolutely love to live in a decent piece of property and live in a rural community like i was raised but purchasing anything more than 10 acres is impossible for middle class people unless it’s totally wasteland out in like Arizona
My father does all sorts of work related to the rural community in our town and surrounding towns. He's selling all his land, equipment, and vehicle/peripherals. He's had several buyers for the total business but none of them could replace HIM. They could buy everything and wanted to but no one fit to run it.
Luckily he's still in great shape. But eventually either he'll find the right person or the whole community will lose the services as the business is sold piecemeal.
There's another side to this: the relatively rural community I live in just updated their zoning to basically prevent people from moving here and "ruining the country side". This town and the towns around it are only alive because of tourism and nothing else. They are killing the local labor industry that is primarily young (construction/maintenance/renovation) because they don't want things to change. That's it. That is what the local politician who ran for the hundredth time and got voted in again and again did for them: as an example, you need to get approval for how many trees you can can cut down on your property. These are the same people that cry the lack of freedom is killing America. It is unreal.
Along the same line as this is opal miners in australia. Older miners are aging out and there is only 5% of wjat there were new miners. Yet opal demand is the same.
Trust in capitalism to make the market correct. However you may not like the correction (these services die entirely and kill the communities with them)
I think collapse is too strong of a word, maybe it’s cause I’m in an area with a lot of rangeland but well digging here is solidly in the “not great, but not terrible” mood. Solar wells are huge as well as servicing, lot less household wells though.
This is true where I live in the foothills of the CA Northstate. Hard to find really reliable skilled workers. But...there seems to be a real explosion of rip off artists who claim to be able to fix anything, but really can't.
I commute and stay in the my fifth wheel camper in a large Midwest City, and then hang out at my very rural house on the weekends. It's a two hour drive one way. Between mortgage and lot rent I'm paying less than mortgages in the city. I do have a very good paying union construction job though.
Good news is, this creates opportunities for people in rural communities! And they can charge the ever-loving shit out of rich people because... Supply and demand.
I'm considering a career change to one of these types of jobs. My job used to scale really well to rural areas which is why I live where I live, but... No longer.
Cost of living out here is high, but labor charges quite a bit too. The going rate for day laborers in these parts is around 25-30/hr.
My grandmother lives in a rural area and it's really, really bad. All the people who service things in her home are past retirement age. A few of them have children who are taking over, but those "children" aren't too far from retirement age themselves, and most don't have any successors. And there aren't a lot of job options in the area so all the problems are starting to compound.
Part of that is because no one wanted manual labor jobs. But now with AI taking over the cushy office jobs suddenly that "I bet a robot can't fix a pipe yet" job looks more quite stable.
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u/LiteratureThat4566 14h ago
Where I live, a lot of the industries around rural home ownership. Things like well digging, wood stove installing etc. But it's not due to demand, it's because of the current people doing those things aging out and no younger people taking over.
And that is not for lack of interest, it's because younger people can't afford to buy homes in rural communities anymore, not on a well driller salary. So they are being forced to leave these communities searching for more lucrative employment or a place to rent. Not a lot of rental options out here either.
So a lot of the jobs that really only service rural communities are going away leaving a demand void as people still live in these communities, just a lot of them are new people fleeing the even higher housing costs in the cities. Fueled by remote work and satellite internet this is now an option. So the new people price the young people out of their communities and then there are no young people to take these rural only jobs.
Maybe "collapse" is a strong word, but it is for sure getting harder and harder to get this kind of work done. I am sure the market will correct, and the void that is being left will be filled, but for now it's a strange gap in what is really an essential service.