
Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.? - pzaich
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-hardest-places-to-live-in-the-us.html
======
valar_m
I am from Bell County, Kentucky, ranked 3110 out of 3135 counties. I no longer
live there, but my parents do. I was there just yesterday for Thanksgiving.

It may be tempting to dismiss the problems plaguing this region as being self-
inflicted, a mere product of backward ways and a collective refusal to catch
up. These problems, however, are infinitely more complex than that. Countless
politicians at every level of government have tried to find a solution.[0] In
the end, they all failed.

It occurs to me as I type this that I don't have a precise thesis for my
comment, other than to say this: It is not easy. If it were easy to fix, we
would have.

[0]
[http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9518](http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9518)

~~~
lisper
> Countless politicians at every level of government have tried to find a
> solution.[0] In the end, they all failed.

You can lead a horse to water...

As long as people insist on believing that the earth is 6000 years old, that
lowering taxes on rich people is going to make their own lives better, and
that the best way to preserve freedom and peace is unfettered access to
firearms, there is only so much you can do for them. At the end of the day you
simply can't help someone who steadfastly refuses to help themselves.

~~~
refurb
What a ridiculous comment. So if they don't subscribe to liberal values they
deserve their fate? You sounds like lke the rednecks i've met. "Those dumb
city folks just don't know any better!"

~~~
lisper
Science is not a liberal value.

~~~
refurb
Looking down on folks who don't think like you apparently is.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Facts are non-negotiable.

~~~
refurb
Treating people with respect should also be non-negotiable.

I'm always amazed at the folks who are "open-minded" and at the same time feel
a need to "correct" anyone who doesn't think the same way they do.

What is the harm if folks have different beliefs than you?

~~~
lisper
The problem is not that their beliefs are different. The problem is that in
places like rural Kentucky, doggedly clinging to beliefs even in the face of
overwhelming evidence to the contrary is widely considered to be a virtue.
That is not an attitude that is conducive to problem-solving, and so,
unsurprisingly, problems tend to go unsolved.

I don't think that pointing this out is in any way disrespectful.

------
fivedogit
I'm from Lexington, KY, the blue dot in a sea of orange on the map. You hear a
lot about Appalachia's woes (the stories on the local news from Bell County,
Bath County, etc are depressing beyond words), but it's been hard for me to
understand _why_ Appalachia is the way it is: chronically, horribly and
uniformly poverty stricken.

So I just read this PBS author interview which tries to put some reasons to
it:
[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings/duncan.html)

The main takeaway, as I read it, is that in cities and other rural areas there
is a middle class and even some upper class folks around and the resources
they bring along (and maybe even the example they set... sorry if that's
offensive) is a positive influence on the extremely poor. In cities, obviously
you have better municipal services and programs and a professional class of
doctors, lawyers, etc. In rural farmland many families own their land which
has some value and there are some wealthy landowners with large tracts
sprinkled in.

In Appalachia, there's none of that. The land isn't worth anything and it's
just poor poor poor as far as the eye can see (which is large, geographically,
unlike inner cities).

Except for coal mine owners and operators. That, I can't explain. Do they live
in the area? Do they not contribute to the communities? The PBS article goes
as far as to say they actively held the poor down to keep them working in the
mines, but I'd have to see more evidence to believe that wholesale.

In any case, it strikes me that this wasteland of poverty with very few middle
class or wealthy folks is the opposite effect of tech hubs. Brad Feld and
others have written about how the density of entrepreneurs and angel investors
with deep pockets is what makes a tech hub viable (very liberally
paraphrased). From a general perspective, it seems like a normal curve where
the outliers at the top are places most uniformly non-poor and populated
densely and the outliers at the bottom are uniformly poor and populated
sparsely.

~~~
bane
It's a bad cycle. Imagine you're the "wealthy" person in a town of poor,
jobless people. What local businesses do you spend you time and money in?
Groceries and gas? Both are probably not locally owned, so most of what you
spend leaves the area. You drive 2 hours on weekends to get to the nearest
Walmart to buy clothes, so again most of your money leaves the area: and none
of the places you're spending at employee lots of people and/or pay them lots
of money. Most of the jobs servicing those industries will be part-time
anyways.

For the people who work in the mines, they make more money, but they honestly
don't really know what to do with it...and there's nothing in particular to
spend it on locally anyway.

Even worse, arable land is a rarity, it is a mountain area! So it's hard to
even build a local agricultural economy. It's isolated from transport links,
landlocked and hard to navigate. If you pick a route from anywhere East of
Appalachia, and take it to San Francisco or L.A., you'll be routed entirely
around the area in favor of a Northern or Southern route.

I didn't grow up in Appalachia, but I grew up in an area not too different
from it. Honestly, if we hadn't been within commuting distance of a major
city, my career options would have been farm work or gas station attendant.
There wasn't even enough of a commercial sector for "retail clerk" to make the
list.

It's a useful thing to drive through that area: it's stunningly beautiful, but
you start to get a feel for why there's so little going on there.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Tourism might work, the area is plenty beautiful. Of course, those jobs aren't
really that great. Most cities in mountainous regions are built in valleys for
that reason.

But really, mountainous areas just can't support that many people, so they
shouldn't be that populated anyways.

> Even worse, arable land is a rarity, it is a mountain area!

In Asia they terrace a lot. Not sure if that is a good idea though, and
definitely not necessary in the states where there is plenty of good
agriculture land (much of China is mountainous, so it is necessary).

~~~
bane
There is, lots of ski resorts, hiking, that sort of thing. The kicker is that
those same places will actually hire in lots of Europeans to work the
facilities, so not only are the employees not local, they aren't even from the
same country!

It's a shame, there's a kernel of some great culture there, a unique dialect,
great music, entertaining local history and color, some beautiful folk art.

Local dialect

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU)

The traditional music is a descendant of Celtic folk music, but unique enough
to be interesting.

Here's a fantastic documentary on the music

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXh8SDp0H-E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXh8SDp0H-E)

All it would really take would be for some kind of Appalachian Music to become
wildly popular and I could see the region getting popular music centers people
would come to visit. Their main possible export market is all cultural.

------
clairity
i was in arkansas last week for my father's passing. i've been writing about
his life as a way to cope, and my trip was a stark reminder of the marginal
lives of the working poor in this country. mind you, these are not people
asking for a handout or who see themselves as poor. but their 40 hours of work
(if they can get it) certainly provides much less for their families. they
have jobs implicated in all sorts of health problems that are barely being
managed by a mediocre health system. they worry about foreclosure and
repossession and deal with payday lenders and pawn shops. phones and other
utilities get cut off for non-payment and they're charged fees they can't
afford to reinstate service. they're not unhappy so much as they have much
harder lives than those of us in the professional ranks. it's simply not fair.

------
weeksie
Urbanization. The trend is continuing and is going to continue and as it does
the rural areas of the country are going to see more and more resources drain
to urban centers. Eventually the rural population will be entirely composed of
maniac bandits driving burnt out plymouth dusters with mounted machine gun
turrets and terrified hill people raising rabbits for food in their back
yards.

But for serious, as we see urbanization pick up, the rural areas are going to
continue their downward slide. And as the trend toward suburbanization has
reversed we're going to see the suburbs become the new "burnt out inner
city"—because inner city is no longer synonymous with poverty and crime.

~~~
thrownaway2424
I'm not sure this forecast is based on the data in this article. Rural land is
actually ridiculously valuable and increasing in value rapidly. I passed up an
opportunity to buy some prime farmland in 2008 at what I considered an
exorbitant price. The same land today is worth triple. Anyway there's a bunch
of very empty, very rural counties in the top decile of this analysis. Just
look at Iowa where there are lots of top counties including Story County. Then
look at Wyoming which looks really good in this analysis.

To some extent I think this analysis is plagued by law of small numbers. It
seems like the ranking is highly influenced by the fraction of disabled people
but there's a lot of quantization noise in that figure, especially when a
county like Teton County, Wyoming contains only 22000 people. I think the same
thing is probably happening in rural eastern California, for instance in Mono
County (pop 14000).

~~~
ap22213
Define valuable. I live in Northern Virginia, where a good acre of land can
cost a million dollars. Yet, I can drive 3.5 hours and get to land that's
worth under $1,000 an acre.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Prime farmland (USDA class 1 soil capability) in Iowa costs 10-12 thousand
dollars per acre. In 2006 such land cost 3-4 thousand. Ref:
[http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c2-75.h...](http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c2-75.html)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Which is currently driven up in price by cheap money that has nowhere else to
go for safe yields (after the stock collapse in '00 and the real estate
collapse of '08).

[http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-
update/files/articles/V15...](http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-
update/files/articles/V15N1_3.pdf)

------
cellis
Why is Loudoun County, Virginia so prosperous? It has a median household
income of $122,000, but I don't see any meaningful employers in the area, and
it's a large population of around 350,000 people.

~~~
colinbartlett
That's Northern VA where tons of tech companies are and was the veritable
center of the internet before Silicon Valley. (AOL is or was headquartered in
Dulles which is in Loudoun County). It still houses a massive amount of
technology companies, data centers, etc.

------
davidw
What's up with Wyoming? Some of those counties have median incomes above 70K.

~~~
rdl
0% state income tax, so if you are rich and have 5 homes, the Wyoming one is a
good primary residence.

Also, lots of ranches. These are usually run off someone's personal taxes, so
high income and high deductions/expenses. $500k/yr income isn't that great
when you need to spend millions every decade and high annual operating
expenses too. A lot of ranching or timber is about early capex leading to
income down the line.

Ski stuff.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> the Wyoming one is a good primary residence.

Something to note: Wyoming doesn't shield either traditional or Roth IRAs
(although ERISA-protected assets like 401ks are) from creditors, unlike other
no-income tax states such as Texas and Florida.

~~~
rdl
Interesting, although probably largely irrelevant for the mega-rich. IIRC
Wyoming _does_ have a homestead exemption, so your house can't be taken.

------
xmstr
The bible belt continues to have some of the worst (or hardest) places to live
in US. If find this very interesting, as many in this area continue to shun
higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.

~~~
bdunbar
> shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.

Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education?

~~~
jchrome
> Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education?

\- He/She never said that any biblical passage tells Christians to shun higher
education. Nice straw man.

He/She said "many in this area continue to shun higher education in favor of
strict adherence to the bible." But, since you are asking the question, lets
look at an answer:

\- How about all of the passages justifying rape/slavery/violence in the Old
Testament? All of these, while not outright shunning higher education, do so
implicitly. Just one example among many:

"However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who
live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident
foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat
them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent
inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel,
your relatives, must never be treated this way." (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)

Something else to look at - "Anti-intellectualism in American Life" (Richard
Hofstadter). A great book. His tale begins with itinerant Baptist ministers
traveling through the bible belt, denouncing those "New England
intellectuals". Anti-Intellectualism and organized American religion in the
South are very good and old friends.

------
lisper
These results need to be taken with a big ol' hunk o' salt. The outliers are
all teeny tiny counties. #1 ranked Los Alamos county has only 17,000
residents, and last-place Clay county has 21,000. The bigger the county, the
more likely it is to simply regress to the mean.

Actually, the most interesting result is that Los Angeles county, which with
~10M people is the most populous in the U.S., is not closer to the middle than
it is.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
That doesn't appear to be accurate. #3 Fairfax County, VA and #9 Montgomery
County, MD both have over a million people which puts them in the top 50
counties in the US by population. The others are smaller, but many are still
much larger than Los Alamos. #4 Loudoun County, VA has 350,000, #6 Howard
County, MD has 290,000, #2 Arlington County, VA has 227,000 and #7 Alexandria
City, VA has 140,000.

It's also worth mentioning that those six counties are all contiguous with
each other. That's a combined total of over 3 million people. That's far too
many to dismiss as simply a statistical outlier.

~~~
lisper
I'm not saying that these results are completely invalid, just that they can't
simply be taken at face value. You have to take things like population into
account when interpreting the data.

------
ams6110
I guess "hard" is subjective. I was guessing the hardest place might be rural
Alaska where you have no electric power or water unless you provide it
yourself, and you have to spend most of the short summer cutting firewood so
you don't freeze to death over the winter, and growing vegetables, fishing,
and hunting so you don't starve.

------
burger_moon
When you compare it to this dot map which shows population density you can see
a relation to high density in rural areas to the worse areas on the other map.
[http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/](http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/)

------
Zaheer
Very interesting data, also compare it to the Racial Dot Map:

[http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/](http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/)

------
EliRivers
Inside some of those prisons looks extraordinarily harsh. The ones where there
is no law and brutal crimes go unpunished every day.

------
DLWormwood
Where’s cost of living in the metrics? Without that, unemployment and median
income paint a very incomplete picture.

~~~
crabasa
Agreed in regards to median income, but COL wouldn't impact life expectancy,
obesity, unemployment or education.

------
Dewie
There seems to be some stark contrasts in South Dakota.

~~~
nostrademons
Also in New York City. While Manhattan is ranked #365 out of 3135, the Bronx
is ranked 2324, Brooklyn is 1306, Staten Island is 601, Queens is 390,
Westchester is 98, and Nassau county is 66. One city (and suburbs) runs the
gamut from poverty to extreme wealth.

~~~
partisan
Having grown up in the Bronx, I am actually really grateful. I can tell you
some horror stories, but the best part of it was that there was still access
to opportunity just an affordable train ride away in Manhattan.

Further up in Westchester and Rockland you find areas that are really deep in
poverty but don't have easy access to reliable public transportation to places
where jobs are more easily found.

------
socialist_coder
Kentucky truly is the worst state in the US.

~~~
briandear
California has the highest cost of living adjusted poverty rate in the United
States.

