It is increasingly hard for small towns to continue to exist in the face of massive migration to cities.
During the last 30 years, 30 million rural Americans have been forced to migrate to large cities, and such migration continues at the rate of 800,000 people a year; and in numbers of other countries - in Ireland and India for example - many people also move to towns in search of more interesting work, and for a better life - looking for information, for a better connection with their own culture. This is invariably having bad effect on small towns. For example, 50% of those people remaining in rural America live on less than $3,000 a year, and there is little money to revitalize the towns they live in.