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It's merely a question of how heavily we subsidize their lifestyle with infrastructure & other spending from the state/federal purse, which ultimately comes from economically productive cities. One of the things we currently do, through differential housing prices, is send retirees to small towns with dead economies. They get a pension, Social Security, and Medicare, and that income is often the sole thing keeping the town afloat. In more distant reaches (I'm thinking Appalachia and parts of the South), generous welfare policies have enabled people to stay in this excess housing capacity despite the lack of jobs. But here's the thing - there are costs to this strategy, like greenhouse gasses and children/grandchildren that have to move away and human capital going to waste, and these people could just as easily have public services provided in a metropolitan area where it's much cheaper to reach them all and provide a good quality of life. The phenomena shows up even at the state level - https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://... but it's much more stark when you start at an older town in the Eastern half of the country and make your way to a productive population center. Hey, we have a fiscal union, unlike the EU; These places aren't Greece because of all those payments, and I don't support turning them into Greece, but because we have that union it's also on us to make deliberate decisions that concentrate less of the population in Stavrodromi and more in Berlin. The game-theoretically natural strategy of utilizing the entirety of the existing housing stock (stratified by income) no matter how decrepit the location, is a bit of a local optima, and better arrangements are not difficult. |
