If there are more people in a city than it provides opportunity for it seems to me to be a similar cruelty to incentivize them to stay in one place because they have "roots" there or something equally vague.
States like disability because it is 100% federally funded and determinations are made by administrative law judges based on local standards. Temporary assistance (aka welfare), Medicaid, and other programs have a administrative and program cost sharing with the state and/or county.
Urban poverty has a lot of disability cases too. Welfare phases out in a few years and chronically poor folks end up labeled disabled.
I call it insidious because once you're on disability, there is an incentive to not try to re-enter the workforce. Most welfare recipients are off the rolls pretty quickly.
I would even agree with urban relocation if one city had a disproportionate number of people trapped in inter-generational poverty and another had extra jobs. I don't think "deep cuts" to urban welfare are ever the solution. I do think that the welfare system should prioritize setting its recipients up for success.
This equation isn't typically true for urban areas, so there's no reason for people to move. (See Detroit for details on exceptions.)
There just aren't any houses, so their quality of life takes a greater hit than staying put in the form of huge commutes and dramatically increased cost of living. See service workers or teachers in San Francisco.
1. https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15834514/rent-transportatio...
2. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607957/the-unaffordable-u...
3. http://www.sfexaminer.com/mayor-lee-spend-44-million-sf-teac...
A basic house is $65k in Morgantown: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Morgantown-WV/22898744...
And a nice house with a 10 minute funicular commute to Downtown Pittsburgh (the Paris of Appalachia) isn't too much more: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/11363350_zpid/globalre...
And one can pay much less if one wishes: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2040-Lowrie-St-Pittsburgh...
Scarcity-driven housing costs are one of the biggest problems in a few coastal cities— but in much of the country, the problem is poverty.
Additionally, there are other cities that have more opportunity than closed mining towns do. At the bare minimum the people need to relocate to someplace marginally better with ANY economic opportunity, because where they're at now has NO opportunity, not necessarily some place that is the top of economic opportunity.
I know folks on the right screamed about the 'welfare queens' living on the tax payers' dime in the inner cities for generation after generation. In reality, this was a coded attack against blacks, and the majority of the claims were hyperbole.
But now the left has begun making the same mean-spirited attacks on uneducated whites from Appalachia, the Midwest, and the south.
Both types of stereotypes are annoying to hear repeated again and again.
If the residents refuse that sort of help and instead demand that the government somehow make the old mines profitable again, then one may indulge in some exasperated eyeball-rolling and mockery, but I'm trying not to do that preemptively.
https://thinkprogress.org/appalachia-used-to-be-a-democratic...
If you're living off of government assistance and vote Republican while Republicans are constantly talking about stripping away said assistance programs, you absolutely deserve whatever happens to you. I have zero sympathy for you. You made your bed, now you get to sleep in it.
The only people I will have sympathy for are the children who have parents that are too dumb to see through the bullshit spewed by Fox, InfoWars, Breitbart, etc, and people that vote Democrat because they know better, but end up getting screwed by the Republicans that don't.
This isn't a case of both sides do it at all.
This economic transition will eventually effect everyone. Everyone. These people are just at the front end of it.
