Ghost cities and abandoned areas with a declining population
When I was a teenager my family decided to dedicate one of our preciously few vacation to visiting my father&#x27;s hometown. It was a town that was built and existed for two things: farming and oil. The oil dried up two generations ago and it threw the town into poverty and disrepair. My father escaped to &quot;the city&quot;, the Army, college and a better life. His siblings and other relatives held on for as long as they could until eventually the entire clan of dozens had left or passed away. For decades they refused to contact or talk to my father, thinking him a &quot;traitor to the family&quot; with his fancy college degree and overseas adventures. From time to time two of his brothers would keep in touch, the common thread to their story was time spent in the military and overseas as well.<p>The town was a ruin. Beautiful turn of the 20th century facades were crumbling, what was once a bustling town square was overgrown and had an abandoned truck left in the middle of it. The roads were in disrepair. All commerce of any kind had moved to another town a few miles away and existed solely of a couple eateries, a drug store, a small bank, and some farm supply stores.<p>We drove aimlessly around as my father explained what this piece of abandoned oil pumping equipment was for or about some childhood adventure he had had pushing one of his polio paralyzed brothers around in his wheelchair or how they had engaged in minor industry to make the $.05 for an ice cream. Rather than a fond trip through nostalgia, the crumbling and abandoned state of the area was hard on him.<p>These areas that are both economically depressed and depopulating slide into poverty, drug dependency, and most recently pointless, embarrassing, and dangerous political radicalization. Industry is not coming back to these place, the oil is dried up, the mill has shut down, the mine is all dug out, and so on. People stay because of memories and family and sometimes &quot;history and heritage&quot;. In the case of my father they chose to shame him for decades for abandoning them. It&#x27;s kind of cult-like in a way.<p>It seems simple to solve, move! Migrate to where the jobs are. But beyond these emotional circumstances that nail people to these failing areas, there is a difficult monetary restraint. It&#x27;s expensive to move elsewhere, especially with an established multigenerational family. It means abandoning functioning domiciles, maybe vehicles or even business relationships with no guarantee of success.<p>We pay people to stay where they are, even if there&#x27;s no long-term prospect, but I would support a &quot;Move America!&quot; program that offered some kind of incentive for people to move to areas with better economic outlook. This means cities for the most part.<p>Both parties don&#x27;t want this because this means a massive transformation in the politics of the urban&#x2F;rural divide.