NYC offering to pay homeless a year’s worth of rent if they leave town

Under rug swept...

I've been thinking we should have a Federal program that helps people in small towns relocate into urban areas or suburban areas at the outskirts of cities. I think letting sparsely populated rural areas depopulate would save us billions on infrastructure since it costs far more per person to run and maintain miles of road out to nowhere rather than short roads to apartments, townhouses, and neighborhoods. As a city dweller, I would gladly exchange the massive federal infrastructure costs that incentivise rural life for the much more consolidated stress this would put on my local infrastructure.

The irony of my proposal is that, while it is in a sense the converse of what NY is doing, I guarantee you it would draw vastly more outrage. The costs of sheltering the 60,000 homeless in NY is nothing compared to the costs of subsidizing rural America to the tune of trillions of dollars. The former is considered a debatable charity, while the latter is never questioned.

I can imagine situations where such a program would be a global net positive. For example, if the victim of homelessness is working homeless, and has family in another city they want to get back to, but do not have the means to secure an apartment in the other city. I doubt they are offering to toss money like this to vagrants.

The optics are awful, but I can think of situations where a program like this comes from a good place and accomplishes some good. Maybe not as much good as building 10x as many new skyscrapers for housing, but some good.

The rural America you speak of doesn't exist. Rural America is mostly small towns that look just like a suburb when it comes to population density. And it doesn't sit there doing nothing, it provides services to the people that work in resource extraction (along with manufacturing sited to take advantage of local materials) and agriculture.

There are certainly lots of dying small towns, but that is hardly evidence of profligate subsidization.

>subsidizing rural America to the tune of trillions of dollars

I'm not sure where you're getting that number from. Here's a federal budget breakdown for FY2016 [1]:

  Non-discretionary spending:
  Social Security: $910 billion
  Medicare: $588 billion
  Medicaid: $368 billion
  Other: $563 billion
  Interest payments: $241 billion
  
  Discretionary spending:
  Defense: $584 billion
  Non-defense: $600 billion

Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payments, and defense would not decrease if rural citizens moved to the city. Thus those subsidies aren't solely for rural America, so I won't include them in your "trillions of dollars" claim unless you want to make the claim that the government is subsidizing both rural and non-rural citizens to the tune of trillions of dollars, which nobody would doubt.

The rest of the budget adds up to $1,163 billion dollars. Even if you made the wild assumption that all that money went straight into the pockets of rural Americans, it's hardly trillions of dollars.

(Note that I'm ignoring state budgets. But I think the trillions of dollars assertion is so absurd that I'm not going to waste the time to look up those stats as well.)

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs....