Promote yourself and your town. I'm looking for a new home in the same way as the OP, and my best hope is that a few dozen like-minded nerds will gentrify a small town, because they have been so undercut by cities of late.
Having grown up in a small idyllic town, there was beauty in the slow struggle to live there.
OP would do well to try and learn the culture before seeking to change it. There’s value beyond “cheaper houses” and “craft beer” in these places.
Coincidentally the novel/film Winter’s Bone author portrayed this area, north Arkansas and southern Missouri.
How does one do this in such a way that it's welcomed by people who already make their home there?
(I can imagine a lot of ways this could go work out badly, but don't immediately know a good approach.)
Directly or not. If you're a rich person moving into a poor town, the only way to not piss off the locals is to make them richer. If you can make the whole town richer, you'll be welcomed. Whatever portion of the locals that you don't make richer will hate you. If you don't want to piss off the locals, and you don't want to employ the locals, this is a very expensive plan.
Small town starts to tax a family for the commercial water line in a general store that closed in the 60's, that happens to be on the property, because, small town. Family has visions of a B&B, vineyard, wedding venue. Everything down the drain in the end, because lawyers are expensive.
Still there to this day: worn out stencil on the window of the 'general store'. "Sorry, we closed in 1968".
The tax was imposed to get the family out of the town, and it worked - the family is not rich. In the end, they had to sell their family home (which had been in the family since the 1930's) and leave (which they did).
They were taxed out because the family is notoriously progressive, and the town is very much the opposite. There was cultural friction. Keep in mind that this was 20 years ago. These were very polite 60's era hippies, all college-edumacated and everything - and the (very small, very tight) town didn't want them in it.
The town hall imposed a (crazy) tax, and they had to leave.
Depending on where you are, some value preserving a local culture over 'getting richer'.
If you have the money and influence to "gentrify" somewhere... just build a new planned community in the middle of nowhere. The US has plenty of nowhere.
Because people are leaving in droves, only old people there are dying off, kids moved to better places, and the economy is dead?
> If you have the money and influence to "gentrify" somewhere... just build a new planned community in the middle of nowhere. The US has plenty of nowhere.
Seems like a waste of resources. The US has had countless migrations within its borders during its existence. Why should we force people not to settle in places with dire economic circumstances and almost no future without outside influx?
Not necessarily. You could buy a house that's empty.
What active behavior are we actually talking about? Making the place nicer? I feel like there's got to be actual some breathing room between "savior of the murder capital Pine Bluff" and "big bad real estate investor gentrifying people out of their homes."
So unlike places with very high rents but also where it seems like 3/4 of all buildings are rented out, most people in Pine Bluff would be objectively better off if rents doubled overnight with corresponding increases to the economy and local services.
To be blunt, if you're renting you have no claim to the property or lodging beyond the term of the lease. That's the entire point. I do believe human beings have a right to housing, but you do not have the right to live in someone else's house if they don't want you there.
Nobody gets removed, they just have to leave. It's a subtle distinction but that's how it happens. Poor people don't own anything. Their furniture is mostly stacks of junk that is so bad that it would be hard or impossible to get someone to accept it for free (this is very nearly a tautology, since the poor person got this furniture for free to begin with, and it's was so bad when they got it that nobody else would give anything for it). They rent. At some point property values are high enough the landlord (or his heir) decides to sell. At the end of the lease, the property is no longer for rent. That's the end of it. However, keep in mind that poor people tend to move every few years regardless. They are right on the edge of falling out of the population of working people who are self sufficient, so it is very common that they end up being evicted, abusing drugs or alcohol (even if just for awhile), or just having too many kids to be able to afford childcare so they can keep working to support themselves. Properties no longer being for rent in some neighborhood has almost no effect on any given poor person who lived in that neighborhood as they are one step above transient anyway.
This isn't an apology, it's just a more accurate description of what happens, I've seen it first hand from the low prestige side of things when I was young.
And while an accurate depiction of how this affects the people who were barely hanging on in the first place, there is a later step, where people who /have/ been renting all their lives in one area find themselves unable to continue to pay rent. You're not necessarily a homeowner if you're not at constant risk of homelessness.
I've seen this while squatting; our neighbours were people who had lived in the same community for 70 years, and their option once the landlord had decided to tear the building down and replace it with "luxury apartments" was far away from everyone they had known all their lives. There were several similar stories in the area.
I think if you make renting someone an apartment a lifelong obligation to provide them with housing at approximately that cost then only a fool would ever rent out an apartment. The supply of apartments to rent would go to approximately 0. One strange consequence of this would be that the price of housing would plummet as a result as all the landlords left the market. When you went to buy a condo, instead of competing with landlords and money launderers you would only be bidding against other people who want to live in the apartment. I saw this first hand at the GHI housing co-op in Maryland, buying a unit there was dramatically below market cost because they did not allow anyone to live in units apart from owners.
As for thinking from an economic perspective, I think anything else is doomed to fail. Unless we think about how people will behave to maximize their own outcomes in some system we risk making things much worse (even if we do think it through we still risk making things much worse, but at least we will have more confidence that we are doing the right thing). Socialist states are a great example of this, they plow ahead on the moral high ground (at least in their moral system) and manage to make their citizens poorer.
Sounds like a sure plan to get your tires slashed, if not your head bashed.