That's exactly my point.

As my wife and I looked at new places to settle, we found that we were
attracted to places with zero or negative growth rates, places where
strip mall development and suburbanization was not occurring. (I live
in Memphis, Tennessee, a healthy hub of suburbanization, where no
development project is ever turned down, so I know of which I speak).

We have found that while we did not necessarily want to live in the
woods, we did want to live in a place where the suburban imprint had
not taken over. Places like Maine, apart from southern Maine, northern
Vermont, and northern and western New York fit the bill. If you
haven't been to rural sections of New York, you really cannot
appreciate how rural it can be.