Move back to your dying hometown. Unless you can’t.

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A recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled “Move to your dying hometown,” told the story of a writer moving from Portland, Oregon, back to a small town of 14,000 people in central Minnesota where her grandmother was from. The writer, Michele Anderson, who is a white cis woman, argues that becoming a “homecomer” is part of a sustainable lifestyle that rejects the culture of chasing empty status and upward mobility of cities. “My work felt trivial and temporary,” Anderson writes about her career in Portland.

This article is one example of a larger narrative that fetishizes return as a way to revive America’s “dwindling” rural communities. In March of 2017, JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, wrote a similar op-ed extolling the virtues of moving back to Middle America. Like Anderson, Vance implies that his decision isn’t just good for him, but good for America. “Those of us who are lucky enough to choose where we live would do well to ask ourselves, as part of that calculation, whether the choices we make for ourselves are necessarily the best for our home communities — and for the country,” writes Vance. Living in the heart of America, they both argue, is the kind of noble choice that could bridge our nation’s deep divides.

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While urban counties are growing at the national rate of 13 percent, half of America’s rural counties now have fewer residents now than they did in 2000.

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