[opportune]

I'm originally from an area not in coal country, but right by it and heavily influenced by it. I couldn't agree with you more. Both my home state and the federal government are already essentially subsidizing these people to live in these communities simply because it's where they were born. There is no infrastructure for jobs because there are no industries other than coal and growing marijuana / making moonshine (although these are done on either an amateur level or highly consolidated).

I am normally a big fan of welfare and similar social services, but especially when they empower recipients to get back on their feet. There are plenty of communities in appalachia with sky-high unemployment and a huge percentage of their residents essentially draw SSI for most of their lives. They need to move, because they and their children will just draw welfare in perpetuity at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of ethical ways to get them to move. Forcing them to move is obviously a terrible idea. Making welfare/SSI contingent on moving could work, but will be absolutely terrible for those with all their wealth tied up in their house. It's a hard problem to solve, especially since a lot of these people are okay with / used to just making enough to get by.

[philipkglass]

Making welfare/SSI contingent on moving could work, but will be absolutely terrible for those with all their wealth tied up in their house. It's a hard problem to solve, especially since a lot of these people are okay with / used to just making enough to get by.

Most of these people probably need to move if they've still working age. Maybe one way to reduce friction would be to have government buy out homes in economically distressed areas at the old valuation. Sure, that's "not fair" to people who faced similar dilemmas in the past and didn't get that sort of help. But I'd prefer that the government be inconsistently helpful over consistently unhelpful.

[ticviking]

How is this different from the narratives of "welfare dependence" and "inter-generational poverty" advanced by republicans to advocate for deep cuts to urban welfare?

If there are more people in a city than it provides opportunity for it seems to me to be a similar cruelty to incentivize them to stay in one place because they have "roots" there or something equally vague.

[Spooky23]

Disability is more insidious than welfare.

States like disability because it is 100% federally funded and determinations are made by administrative law judges based on local standards. Temporary assistance (aka welfare), Medicaid, and other programs have a administrative and program cost sharing with the state and/or county.

Urban poverty has a lot of disability cases too. Welfare phases out in a few years and chronically poor folks end up labeled disabled.

I call it insidious because once you're on disability, there is an incentive to not try to re-enter the workforce. Most welfare recipients are off the rolls pretty quickly.

[opportune]

The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities. They may not all be >$50k solid middle class jobs, but they are there. There are actually almost no jobs in these areas.

I would even agree with urban relocation if one city had a disproportionate number of people trapped in inter-generational poverty and another had extra jobs. I don't think "deep cuts" to urban welfare are ever the solution. I do think that the welfare system should prioritize setting its recipients up for success.

[jdmichal]

To answer the question, I would stop phrasing it in terms of jobs and instead in terms of productivity and imports / exports. These small communities require a good amount of imports, especially if they want something resembling a modern life with modern technology. They thereby need balancing exports to pay for them. There is very little opportunity for these people to do productive work and export it. So instead there is a reliance on government subsidy for the required imports.

This equation isn't typically true for urban areas, so there's no reason for people to move. (See Detroit for details on exceptions.)

[rfrank]

> The main difference is that there are at least jobs in cities.

There just aren't any houses, so their quality of life takes a greater hit than staying put in the form of huge commutes and dramatically increased cost of living. See service workers or teachers in San Francisco.

1. https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15834514/rent-transportatio...

2. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607957/the-unaffordable-u...

3. http://www.sfexaminer.com/mayor-lee-spend-44-million-sf-teac...

[akgerber]

This is often true on the coasts, but not particularly true in Appalachia or Appalachia-adjacent urban areas.

A basic house is $65k in Morgantown: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Morgantown-WV/22898744...

And a nice house with a 10 minute funicular commute to Downtown Pittsburgh (the Paris of Appalachia) isn't too much more: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/11363350_zpid/globalre...

And one can pay much less if one wishes: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2040-Lowrie-St-Pittsburgh...

Scarcity-driven housing costs are one of the biggest problems in a few coastal cities— but in much of the country, the problem is poverty.

[rfrank]

How many people in Appalachia can afford a down payment on any house? From a quick search of the addresses you linked, all are in places with high rates of property & violent crime. None of them seem like better options than being poor in your home town, and avoiding the myriad risks associated with big moves when you're a low earner who can't take any hits at all to monthly income without major sacrifices.

[akgerber]

Neither Troy Hill nor Duquesne Heights nor the South Side Slopes nor the entire city of Morgantown are terribly crime-ridden, by either personal experience or any statistics that I know of. Troy Hill is the 'worst' area but mostly has low-level quality of life crime. High crime neighborhoods generally have $30k houses, which are too cheap to mortgage and bought by investors that rent them out until they're falling apart, then abandon them.

Both Pittsburgh and Morgantown are pretty prosperous, yet remain affordable enough for blue-collar workers to own homes close enough to the center of the city to commute by foot, bus, streetcar, funicular, PRT pod, or bike. The neighborhoods I posted are a bit rundown, but perfectly livable— I'd live in any of them.

The schools aren't necessarily great in the Pittsburgh neighborhoods but they usually aren't in rural Appalachia either.

I don't disagree that moving is hard when one is poor and one relies on one's social connections for a lot of support. It's just not because of a lack of houses in the prosperous parts of Appalachia.

Housing shortages on the coasts are a huge issue, and a huge issue for national inequality— but overbuilding and inner-city abandonment remain a bigger issue in a lot of cities in the middle of the country.

[thwarted]

While true, this is largely beside the point, and is addressable because it's mostly caused by politics. We don't need to have yet another discussion about Bay Area building constraints.

Additionally, there are other cities that have more opportunity than closed mining towns do. At the bare minimum the people need to relocate to someplace marginally better with ANY economic opportunity, because where they're at now has NO opportunity, not necessarily some place that is the top of economic opportunity.

[rfrank]

No, it's not beside the point, and it's actually a huge portion of the point. Those same constraints exist in the majority of major cities in America.

For people on the low end of the earning spectrum, the lack of tangible benefits for moving outside of a vague promise of better job prospects makes staying put a viable option. If you worked at McDonalds, would you move across the country and away from your entire social support system for a chance to commute two hours on public transit to work at Arbys? I wouldn't.

[kefka_p]

As somebody who has been on both relatively low and high ends of the earning spectrum, I'd say that the vague promise of a better job is far better than some of the alternatives. Very little is stopping these people who live minutes away from the "Paris of Appalachia" from pursuing education and improving their chances elsewhere in a manner they couldn't reproduce even in the presence of their "entire social support" systems, which I might add seem to be coming up short in the first place.

[hiram112]

Good point.

I know folks on the right screamed about the 'welfare queens' living on the tax payers' dime in the inner cities for generation after generation. In reality, this was a coded attack against blacks, and the majority of the claims were hyperbole.

But now the left has begun making the same mean-spirited attacks on uneducated whites from Appalachia, the Midwest, and the south.

Both types of stereotypes are annoying to hear repeated again and again.

[philipkglass]

I agree that people should remain compassionate. I understand why some people experience schadenfreude when it's rural Republican voters failing to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" after hearing that advice given to urban Democratic voters, but tit-for-tat shaming is not humane. These people largely don't vote how I vote but they are still my fellow citizens. They have dependent children and elders. Some degree of suffering is probably unavoidable, because relocation is painful and many of these towns don't have long term futures. I don't want their residents to experience unnecessary suffering as some sort of lesson. We should try to help the people transition to better opportunities in other regions.

If the residents refuse that sort of help and instead demand that the government somehow make the old mines profitable again, then one may indulge in some exasperated eyeball-rolling and mockery, but I'm trying not to do that preemptively.

[meric]

Sorry, this is just Democratic voters tearing themselves apart. Appalachia used to be a democratic stronghold. These are people don't want to live on welfare generation after generation, and that's what they tried to vote for.

https://thinkprogress.org/appalachia-used-to-be-a-democratic...

[rayiner]

Shaming is an important part of society. It's how we incentivize positive behaviors and discourage negative ones.

[cmurf]

Like slut shaming, gay bashing, nerd bullying? Or maybe you'd like to better qualify or narrow your assertion? Because multiple generations did this, for exactly the reasons you state: it was good for society.

[rayiner]

It's like saying "law is an important part of society." You don't need to qualify that statement by expressly disavowing laws that protected slavery, made homosexuality illegal, etc.

"Shame" is defined as "a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior." Teaching people to feel shame for conduct like lying, cheating, and stealing is an important tool societies use to enforce social norms in situations (such as with young people), where resort to legal action would be excessive and harmful.

It works at a macro level too. Consider this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-25947984 ("Child Labor: India's Hidden Shame"). The word succinctly captures the international community's disapproval of certain practices that are common in certain places, with the implication that continuation of those practices will meet with continued disapproval from international peers. Again, that's an important social tool at the international level.

[themacguffinman]

Except for the crucial difference that progressives generally don't think sluts, gays, or nerds are engaging in negative behaviour.

[Sohcahtoa82]

I have no sympathy for people that vote against their own interests.

If you're living off of government assistance and vote Republican while Republicans are constantly talking about stripping away said assistance programs, you absolutely deserve whatever happens to you. I have zero sympathy for you. You made your bed, now you get to sleep in it.

The only people I will have sympathy for are the children who have parents that are too dumb to see through the bullshit spewed by Fox, InfoWars, Breitbart, etc, and people that vote Democrat because they know better, but end up getting screwed by the Republicans that don't.

[addicted]

Except it's still the left that is expanding support and assistance for the "uneducated whites from Appalachia..." and the right that is taking it away.

This isn't a case of both sides do it at all.

[opportune]

I'm not making a mean spirited attack. In fact, I think in the long run moving would even be beneficial for these people

[Gargoyle]

I think in the long run it won't matter. For the most part, the jobs they could get in the cities are starting to vanish as well. In 10-20 years, the cities will have it even worse at the lower economic end. People might as well stay where they want to live.

This economic transition will eventually effect everyone. Everyone. These people are just at the front end of it.

[terravion]

Why do you think this? Can you provide some evidence? There was a lot of hand wringing during the recession about the end of work--"we're all losing our jobs to the robots," etc.--but it seems like there are as many jobs as ever and more good jobs. This is especially true from a global perspective. While many blue collar workers in the US are suffering from competition from foreign substitution, there are literally billions more people joining the middle class globally. It doesn't sound like the end of human work when you zoom out.

Also, if you compare the rate of job displacement right now with technology compared to say the early 20th century where a majority of the jobs that existed 50 years prior were "destroyed", then it doesn't seem like we're at much of an inflection point.

More likely, because we have development policies that make it hard/expensive to move, we're not putting people in the new jobs like we used to--this has down the line effects of slowing growth because the workers who are also consumers aren't spending what they could have.

[eropple]

> It doesn't sound like the end of human work when you zoom out.

Say that in another thirty years, though. You're referring to billions of people in countries that haven't yet entered a post-industrial economic situation. Are those billions any safer than the millions in the U.S. who've fallen out of it?

[anigbrowl]

Of course, there aren't a whole lot of ethical ways to get them to move

Offering people a chunk of money works quite well. If they're likely to be on welfare anyway why not offer them a few years' worth up front, to reflect the costs of their dislocation?

American society is very accounting-driven and wants everything itemized and explained, which seems awfully wasteful to me. It would be more efficient (for the state) and more dignified (for the recipient) to just offer to buy them out for (say) $25,000.

[gozur88]

Usually what happens is people with extensive social networks and (now virtually worthless) property stay in the area, and their children leave for greener pastures. I have relatives in Western PA in a town that was built around oil and lumber. The oil and lumber are gone, and with them went all the jobs.

The people who live there now must be around 70 on average. At some point that town is just going to die and become unincorporated county land.

[maxerickson]

If there are really no jobs and the prospects for new industries are poor, offer relief by purchasing the houses.

Then tear them down.

[wmeredith]

Is there remote work these people could do using the internet?

[opportune]

Maybe mechanical turk, but that would probably only pay like $1-$5/hr at most if done at a regular rate (e.g. a 40 hour work week). Other than that, no. The vast majority of the US, including unemployed people in Appalachia, do not have the luxury of having such an in-demand skill that employers are willing to let them work remotely.