Years ago a friend of mine was buying a home in eastern PA; he took a map and compass, and drew circles around the gibsmedat populations indicating a radius of X miles. He then told his wife she could pick anywhere outside of those circles to live, and it worked incredibly well; no urban sprawl has reached them decades later, and you never encounter any gibsmedats when you visit.
Unless companies are looking to use some as workers, I expect they’ve been doing the same as well. Here in NJ, many companies have abandoned the cities for office parks in suburbs miles away; in this manner not only can they attract workers that were refusing to work in the cities, but they also avoid the “gibsmedat tax” imposed on any company in such cities (requiring them to “give back to the community” and hire their allotment of unemployable tokens).
“gibsmedat”??
Now that you mention it, every one of the large companies I audited on the east coast were located in rural and semi rural areas. Including AMP, which I believe is still in eastern PA.