My state, Georgia, has created a Rural Development Council to address the issues facing rural Georgia. (For instance, access to health care is pretty bad.)
The Council released its recommendations a while back, and among them is a plan to pay people to move to rural Georgia:
To reverse the current population migration trend, the council proposes a "Rural Relocate and Reside” program designed to incentivize rural living, especially for professional, high wage earners through a local and state government partnership that
- Is available in counties experiencing less than five percent population growth over five consecutive years (currently 124 counties)
- Provides a one-time, per person/filing jointly 10-year income tax deduction up to $50,000 for new residents
- Allows local governments to pass a referendum to provide a one-time, 10-year, abated property tax exemption to provide more affordable housing and improved cash flow for new residents to pay back school loans/establish businesses/start medical practices
- Provides a one-time per person/filing jointly, 10-year state income tax exemption up to $100,000 where the local property referendum is in place to draw professional-level, high-wage earners
(There are other policy recommendations, too, like providing broadband internet access. No discussion of expanding Medicaid eligibility though.)
Sure there are plenty of arguments either way for subsidizing people to move to rural Georgia (and yes, these are government subsidies, though they take the form of tax deductions and exemptions - any public economist can tell you that tax expenditures are equivalent to actual expenditures). What's interesting to me is the effect on Georgia's environment. Lots of evidence shows that, all else equal, urbanization is good for the environment, since people who live in cities drive less and consume less energy overall. (Use this cool map and zoom in to the metro area of your choice to see.)
Paying people to live in rural areas thus has a negative side-effect of effectively subsidizing energy consumption. (My colleague Kyle Mangum shows in this paper that housing policy has basically the same effect.) This is in addition to any other negative side-effects it might have, like reducing overall productivity by reallocating people from more-productive urban areas to less-productive rural areas. These ought to be traded off against whatever benefits the policy may create.
