[zanny]

I'm sure plenty of people would be up for living in the ghost towns around the country if it weren't for the issue of needing access to food and services (utilities, medical care, etc).

On one hand, you want to think its a great idea to take all the poor and homeless and disenfranchised and just pay to let them live in these houses otherwise decaying for nothing.

But then, at the same time, you realize the real cost isn't in the houses anyway. It makes way more financial sense to keep them where they are, ramp up the residential density, and let the abandoned houses and towns degrade. Maintaining their infrastructure and supply lines, especially across vastly low density areas, is an insane expense - on the orders of hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted expense annually - and trying to artificially maintain that circumstance to use up poorly planned real estate of yesteryear is asking for financial troubles.

The real impairment holding back American prosperity is structural, but it is more in how we don't promote sustainable and affordable living. We artificially constrain population density for NIMBYisms, build cities around cars instead of people, and run infrastructure deficits in almost every county in the US that leads to the degradation of society as the bridges between us, in all their forms (digital or physical) crumble with age and disuse.