In some cases it is weirdly hard to search for accurate information about locations, as you generally have to pick a location and then investigat that specifically. I'm actually finding AI to be specifically helpful in this, e.g. "Show me all cities in the US with populations between 100k and 500k that have average yearly temps between 30 and 70 degrees F." And Realtor.com has recently (within the past year, I think) implemented a function where you can see where airports, gas stations, grocery stores, entertainment venues, and so on are lotated in relation to the property you're looking at, which is nice.
You're right about the information challenges. In theory, Google Maps, Google street view, the city's website, and some basic internet searching should be able to paint a realistic view of a place. In practice, in 100% of the times when I've heavily researched a place before traveling there, the impressions I got from my sleuthing were to a large degree wrong.
So for lack of direct experience, I suspect we're falling back on brand names and stereotypes. You'll have more fun if you go to a theater in New York City than you'll have if you go to a theater in Lexington, KY, right? Or is that really true? Or is it subjective (i.e. you'll nitpick the Lexington show, but not the NYC show)? People who have never explored both options have strong opinions*.
There is a similar issue with education. Zillow displays school rankings as a single number, as if it doesn't matter if you read to your small child every night, do flash cards, spend quality time with them, ensure homework gets done, give them music lessons, enrolled them in pre-K, or encourage them to get engaged in school extracurricular activities or AP classes. Or as if it doesn't matter if the averages are pulled down by kids of low socioeconomic status, whose usually-lower performance has little to nothing to do with your kid's situation. Nope, everyone seems to believe
they will receive that one number no matter what, as if education is a product bought off a shelf.
*Exception: It is factual that the rotel-based nacho dip they're so proud of in Texas is not the real way to do it. People anywhere else, including Mexico, use white queso fresca, which is much better. :)
So if we can't even properly evaluate a town or city in current times, I doubt the internet has much to teach us about the title to this thread: "future planning and declining population".
But we are still talking about wildly different levels of "small towns". You keep mostly citing places with 200k+ in the city proper (700k+ in the metro), and I keep talking about places like Storm Lake, IA (pop. 11k) (which is actually the most ethnically diverse city in the state) or Elmira, NY (pop. 27k) Speaking of the ethnic communities, the aforementioned Storm Lake would be great if you looking for a Laotian, Micronesian, or Hispanic community, but you probably would be out of luck looking for a Lebanese or Polish one. The cosmopolitanism threshold you reference is multi-faceted and individualistic, and is not necessarily satisfied by a specific number of bars, grocery stores, museums, or presence of an orchestra.
Yes, there are LCOL options that are tiny towns and there are LCOL options that are sprawling megapolis cities like Kansas City or Memphis or Detroit. It's tough to talk about both at the same time. If you talk about small towns, people say no that won't work for me because I
need the amenities and culture of big cities. If you talk about big cities, people question whether there are enough professional jobs, or if those <$250k houses are in crime war zones, or if the museums are good enough (uh, how often do you visit museums?).
Let's just say our lucky current situation is that we're able to choose any lifestyle we want, from ultra-rural to ultra-urban, and still get it as a LCOL area. At any level of city size, it is currently possible to find places with plentiful jobs, affordable lifestyles, quality education, and the ability to save up massive nest eggs. I wonder if this crazy arbitrage opportunity exists due to information asymmetries which might be resolved due to cultural or technological changes.
In the dystopian future we're headed towards, the difference between a liberal and conservative region is more apt to be the likelihood that someone will Anne Frank a person in their attic, or jury nullification whatever bullshit charges the State has you on trial for.
There is value in the neighborly solidarity you're writing about,
but {gestures at the regime's intentionally provoked issues in LA} it's also likely the regime will see HCOL cities as the epicenter of challenges to its power, and crack down on those places first, making them a convenient scapegoat. Creating problems and oppressing people in California or New York makes more sense to the regime than creating problems and oppression for its supporters in Texas and Florida. Better to provoke chaos in Gavin Newsom's cities than Ron DeSantis'.
When an authoritarian regime takes control over a whole country, it is historically rare for the winning move to be to "pour one's resources into real estate in the areas with the highest concentration of liberals". In what part of Syria would you have been willing to live over the past 15 years? In what part of Russia or Belarus are LGBTQ people safe from persecution? In Venezuela, even the hotbeds of opposition to the Chavez/Maduro regime have descended into abject poverty, crime, and oppression. In El Salvador, no male person anywhere in the country is safe from being rounded up and detained for life without trial - about 6% already have been. Is there any free neighborhood in all of Cuba? Is Hong Kong really freer than mainland China?
In Nazi Germany, support for the party was always weakest on the western side of the country, but that was obviously not a safe place to be. In fact, the Frank family fled from Frankfurt, in Western Germany, to Amsterdam, an even more liberal city. The parallel for our purposes would be fleeing California for Vancouver, BC. Their fatal error was to not flee even further, as hard as that might have been given language barriers, financial limitations, immigration restrictions, and small children.
The point is, if there is a chance the U.S. will end up as an authoritarian regime rather than enduring another 4 years of Trumpian abuse of power, then people in HCOL areas need to sell their properties, set up offshore accounts in a different currency, get their passport in order, and start learning a foreign language ASAP. That was the winning move in all of the examples I've ever found, and the earlier it was acted upon the better.
And if you can't do that, it still makes sense to move to LCOL areas, freeing up money to move offshore. Find allies and pool the resources needed to help each other if things get bad. The saying "if you wouldn't buy it again you should sell it" comes to mind. If you were already established in Chile or Ireland or Australia, would you leave there to buy a $650,000 house in a HCOL area of Trump's United States?
