That feels like the wrong way of looking at it. The houses are very rural and dilapidated and cheap because no one wants them. Encouraging just about anyone to get out there and make it a home, highly-paid software engineers included, would be an economic boon for that area.

Houses don't get left abandoned in places with jobs. Knowledge workers are the only ones that can do remote work and thus are the ideal people to take those houses.

That's how you end up with an unhealthy neighborhood. All modern "let's give houses to poor people" program learned this lesson the hard way, and the current, better method is to ensure the recipients of these welfare programs are distributed among the rest of the neighborhood.

If the empty houses described in the article are clumped up, it would be best if the economic status of the recipients is disregarded.