Anyway, the assertion that rents "surging" to just under $2k per month is obviously not driven by small towns in the USA where you can easily load up on houses around $150k a pop.
Small towns are dying and have been for a while globally because of the technology revolution. People are flocking to cities. Home prices and rents have been surging in desirable areas, and where some metros are keeping up with construction others are not which is exacerbating the problem.
Honestly my hot take on this is a bit broader: This small town dying thing is the death of an entire way of life for many americans and they feel attacked because nobody is coming to save them or their way of life (because, honestly, it's not valuable or important). There's no more farm labor jobs and buying farms is out of reach for them since major land owners have snapped up everything before it even goes on the market. So they can't own a farm, and there's no more farm labor jobs which means there's not that many people spending $$ in those areas so the service industry dried up in those rural towns. I think that's why a lot of rural folks are so angry. They're desperately poor, unable to bootstrap themselves or their families, everyone that has the aptitude has already fled, and those small towns are aging rapidly because the young people left. Their nest egg, their homes in most cases, is valueless. The last time the world went through a seismic economic shift like we're currently going through was the industrial revolution. Back then the revolution led to vast economic disparity, which led to political unrest, which led to some countries putting down peasant revolts. It's already coming to that in some pockets. It'll be a while before the disparity stabilizes, imo, since the global economy is continuing to evolve so rapidly.
