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.

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.

• TkTech

  today at 7:05 AM

  > 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.

• hdgvhicv

  today at 6:28 AM

  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.

• frail_figure

  today at 6:33 AM

  > 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.

• tanepiper

  today at 6:16 AM

  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

• retired

  today at 6:30 AM

  Just hire a large muscular guy from the banlieues to drive you around in your Maserati.

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.

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.

• gfrecvh

  today at 6:34 AM

  > 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.

  • bonesss

    today at 7:05 AM

    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.

  • retired

    today at 6:44 AM

    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.

• Towaway69

  today at 6:39 AM

  > 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!

• simongray

  today at 6:39 AM

  > 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.

  • ghaff

    today at 6:57 AM

    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.

  • mjr00

    today at 6:44 AM

    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.

    • keiferski

      today at 7:00 AM

      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.

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?

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.

• Ekaros

  today at 7:03 AM

  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 area on the map that is green corresponds to the blue banana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana

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.

• yoz-y

  today at 6:22 AM

  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.

Odd, why has Hamburg and Berlin stayed the same population in the last 30 years?

• yokaze

  today at 7:07 AM

  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.

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

1. The phenomenon exists, but what is the problem?

2. Surely "municipality" does not mean the same thing in different countries.

Yet still a lot of houses is expensive as h...rent/buy - doesn't really matter.

• Ekaros

  today at 7:05 AM

  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.

• ilovecake1984

  today at 6:45 AM

  The government still has to maintain the infrastructure, whilst building more where the people have moved to.

• gfrecvh

  today at 6:28 AM

  Houses are expensive in places where everybody wants to be.

  • hdgvhicv

    today at 6:32 AM

    It’s supply and demand. Unless the supply significantly outnumbers demand then land owners can increase the cost to extract all consumer/producer surplus.

  • igor_nast

    today at 6:30 AM

    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.

    • matherial

      today at 6:40 AM

      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.

    • gfrecvh

      today at 6:37 AM

      I take it you've never heard of the 1 euro houses in rural Italy then...?

      • slaw

        today at 7:03 AM

        These 1 Euro houses are scam. You have to pay for renovation more than it is worth.

        • gfrecvh

          today at 7:07 AM

          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.

      • igor_nast

        today at 6:48 AM

        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.

        • gfrecvh

          today at 7:06 AM

          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.

What is the actual problem with this development?

How about the other half?

Good time to go? Better and more affordable life?

• pllbnk

  today at 6:19 AM

  The life quality is definitely better. The affordability hardly so, unless you can secure your income streams.

Anthropologists announce that human populations tend to congregate towards urbanity. Next sports.

• wannabe44

  today at 6:26 AM

  And urban civilizations eventually collapse?

• rf15

  today at 6:14 AM

  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.

  • ta20240528

    today at 6:16 AM

    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.

    • jacobolus

      today at 6:22 AM

      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.

    • pibaker

      today at 6:30 AM

      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.

• selimthegrim

  today at 6:04 AM

  What, no "film at 11" or "Later tonight, Kojak"?

• cineticdaffodil

  today at 6:10 AM

  [dead]

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…

• pibaker

  today at 6:35 AM

  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.

  • retired

    today at 6:45 AM

    Northern France isn’t that mountainous and is way, way more urbanized than The Netherlands.

• spwa4

  today at 6:39 AM

  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.

half have fewer... and.. half have more?

• adaml_623

  today at 6:41 AM

  The population in general is larger which is why depopulation of towns is interesting

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).

• gfrecvh

  today at 6:30 AM

  I would to like to know which of its interventions you're talking about. People don't normally complain about the help on WW2

  • today at 6:40 AM

  • today at 6:39 AM

  • today at 6:38 AM

• perpetuallunch

  today at 6:44 AM

  When did the USA interfere militarily in Europe?

  Would Europe have been better off under Nazi Germany?

  Is that what you’re saying?

• flohofwoe

  today at 6:51 AM

  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?

• nobodywillobsrv

  today at 6:26 AM

  Yes. This is basically true but unclear the causal link to the true problems.