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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday November 11 2017, @10:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the free-money dept.

They'll pay you upfront, but will you pay for the rest of your life?

While 54% of Americans lived in rural places in 1910, that number fell to 19 percent by 2010, Zillow reported. To revive their communities, these places are hoping that everything from cash grants to paying off student loans and giving away free land will help draw a younger generation to them.

But it's not just small towns that hope to draw more people to them with these programs. Some cities like Baltimore and even entire states like Alaska will pay you to be their newest resident.

Tribune, Kansas will pay off $15,000 of your student loans. Marne, Iowa will give you free land if you build a house that's at least 1,200 ft2 on it. Baltimore, Maryland will give you a $5,000, 5yr forgivable loan and $10,000 down payment toward rehabilitating abandoned homes.

Tempted?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:01PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:01PM (#595668) Journal

    From your description, you already have an oversupply of people who don't know how to run a city government. For some reason many of them seem to be running the city government.

    So I understand your point of view. But be aware that this is true in a lot of other places, too. The "land locked" thing may be your salvation, sort of, as it keeps the city from growing (well, except up).

    The problem is that city governments always need more money. This seems to be a universal. But when they get it they spend it on the projects most important to those running the city rather than those most important to the citizenry. I don't know what to do about that prior to the Singularity. (And how will *that* solve the problem? Perhaps we'd rather not know.)

    Many people seem to want to return to their idealization of the early 1900's, but the population wouldn't survive in that kind of structure. Even then population pressures were pressing at the edges of what the system could support. With current populations... No, thank you. If that percentage of the population died it would probably include me. And if you read literature current at the time you'll find out it wasn't all that ideal to those living in it.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:35PM (#595680)

    TBH, if we had more room for people to move in and for us to resolve the traffic mess, I don't think it would be as much of an issue.

    We're a rich city, we have plenty of money to cover things that need to be covered. In the '80s before the city government went to crap, they figured out how to diversify our local economy so it was based on logging, shipping, aerospace and technology. Now, it's getting overly top-heavy with overpaid techies that don't give a shit about what they're doing to the city. And why should they care, if there's a bust they'll just move elsewhere. Even if there isn't a bust, they'll get sick of working for one of our companies and retire, taking their money elsewhere. The property that they grossly overpaid for gets sold at the same or more money by the next group moving in and anybody that has been working here can't afford to buy.

    And since we're legally barred from having an income tax, the city doesn't benefit from the ridiculous salaries being paid.

    The other problem is that we're wasting tons of money on idiotic liberal friendly things like bike lanes and street cars. That money would better be directed at fixing our roads and improving our mass transit system. We have an increasingly dysfunctional education and the quality of life is in a bit of a nose dive as traffic gets worse and there's more and more people.

    I personally would rather have a city more like in the past when we were the high end of backwater and people wondered if they could get basic necessities when traveling here. Not every city needs or wants to be world class and that's something that outsiders don't seem to understand or respect.