[thghtihadanacct]

... or paid to relocate individuals to places with houses. People dont like to talk about all the empty houses in less than desirable places. Rather, state governments and large businesses talk about needing to build housing everywhere cuz money.

[amanaplanacanal]

Plenty of house are available in places with shrinking economies. Most folks would rather live where jobs are available. How does shipping people to tiny towns with no job prospects help anybody?

[SkyPuncher]

Where are those houses? Where are the jobs that go with those houses?

[pfannkuchen]

If there are more people in a place, there will be more demand for workers in the place to support the people, no?

If this is not sufficient we need to look at making places less dependent on centralized specialist geographic areas, because that approach does not scale well.

[SkyPuncher]

I know this is borderline ad hominem, but your arguments feel so far from reality that it's hard to discuss in any detail.

Yes, worker demand would go up, but that would only be for a portion of jobs. Imagine you have a small, desktop ant farm with fixed supply of food. You add an additional 10x ants to that farm. Sure, some of the new ants will collect food for the queen, but what do the rest of the ants do? The colony doesn't have any additional food source, they were already surviving with 10x less ants.

Likewise, whether or not centralized geographic areas scale well doesn't really matter. What matters is how all other options scale - and they scale worse.

----

I've lived in rural America for the past decade for my wife's job. I've been fortunate to be able to work remotely, but without that I'd likely be unemployed or far underemployed. There just aren't job opportunities for me in small towns.

[davkan]

You can’t put the cart before the horse. There needs to be job prospects in order to relocate.

[thghtihadanacct]

You certainly can, thats what subsidies are for. Put the jobs back, incentivize corporations to revamp decrepit towns. Like Klamath, a beautiful old city that fell into disrepair because logging and mining gone ... people didnt leave because it was unlivable. Tax breaks for revitalizing a town and tariffs for any virgin ground broken.