Humans have been moving from the hinterlands to the cities for hundreds of years.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of living in big cities. There's a lot of stress that comes with the crowding. That says, when it comes to comparing cities to towns, there's a lot to be said about more abundant resources from schools and hospitals to job options to places to eat and shop and live, provided cost of living is kept in check. Natural movement to the cities strike me overall as healthy for society, though I'll acknowledge there are probably a bunch of caveats that come with dense living but technology slowly and surely seems to be helping in that area. Medicine and hygiene, architecture, etc. I think eventually, it might be better for the environment over all, only because I imagine that the less space we use up in the natural world, the less we conflict with it.

I wonder if we as a country put more focus in job re-training and relocation programs, we'd have an easier transition. A lot of the unfilled jobs that are out there are skilled work jobs, such as plumbers and electricians, construction workers, arborists, lock smiths, you name it. The two big problems that I seem to see, at least from my perspective, is that A) a lot of these jobs have financial barriers to entry, even if there are apprentice tracks to get into them and B) a lot of places just don't seem to want to entertain the idea of hiring people past a certain age. Barbara, from the article is already in retirement, but I bet someone half her age wouldn't get a lot of employers giving them a serious look.