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[quote=Anonymous]I think helping the rust belt cities (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, etc.) is a different problem than helping rural areas which happen to be in the rust belt.

In terms of cities, jobs need to be encouraged in high-paying growth areas such as IT, finance, and health care. And the city centers need to be attractive to younger people and young families. That means access to good, reliable public transit, access to amenities, walkable, liveable communities, good public schools and/or reputable charter/private schools that actually provide a good education and aren't fly-by-night profit factories, and reducing crime. Gentrification, basically. There are plenty of smart, younger people in these areas. If good jobs are there, they will stay and not permanently move away after college. The laid-off 50 year old former factory worker can benefit from re-training programs, and tax breaks to encourage skilled manufacturing jobs as well. But all those problems are mostly solved at the state and local level - not sure what the federal government could do there other than provide some funding.

You've also got the problem that those cities used to be quite a bit bigger, population-wise, than they are now. So you have entire blocks that are just burned-out building after burned-out building. It's very expensive for these cities with an inadequate tax base to maintain these streets and patrol for crime - so either money is wasted or they become huge hotbeds of crime. Redevelopment here isn't, like, "move in a Whole Foods and an outdoor strip mall and hope it takes off." With the loss of population, there's no need for the city to be as physically large as it is.The blighted areas have got to go as they are dangerous eyesores.

In terms of the rural population, in general, I'm honestly not sure what can or should be done. That's where you're going to see generational poverty - little kids growing up with no books and no toys, barely literate by the time they graduate high school, drug use, alcoholism, a true lack of opportunity and basically any kind of jobs, really, really different from urban poverty. The problem is it's just not an efficient use of anyone's tax money (federal, state, or local) to concentrate on an impoverished rural county with a population of 15,000, or even a whole region with a population of 500,000, when you can reach that many people easily in a city and its suburbs all in the same state.  Maybe the people living in those areas just need to be encouraged to move, I don't know. Not that cities don't have a lot of problems - they do. But if I'm a rural poor person stuck in nowhere, Kentucky, if I don't have a reliable car I'm stuck at home - no public transit. It's probably hard for me to get food - no corner stores to walk to. My local library is probably 45+ minutes away if I even had a car, and due to funding cuts the hours aren't great. I really don't think it would be such a bad thing if those areas were completely depopulated apart from some farmers and the residents relocated to more urban areas with more opportunities.[/quote]

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