Have you… lived in those kind of places? One side of my family’s from not even that bad of one, and there are tons of the ultra-poor. They’re the ones living in

Have you… lived in those kind of places? One side of my family’s from not even that bad of one, and there are tons of the ultra-poor. They’re the ones living in a house with a blue tarp on part of the roof, three broken cars in the yard, overgrown weeds right up to the foundation, et c. The land’s owned by some family member (all three crappy acres are worth $2,000 total—the house is worth negative dollars—so it’s not like they’re giving up a fortune to let them stay there) or is an illegal rental. They often have one or two even-worse-off buddies living with them. Income and hand-me-downs (clothes, anppliances, old cars they’ll break and not be able to repair within a year which’ll join the front yard scrap pile) are from family and churches. Income, if any, is government assistance (lots of vets) and odd jobs. They have a bunch of health problems and are probably addicted to something. If they don’t have family to get them to the hospital 90 minutes away, they do without. They die decades younger than they might. These are my people, and it gets worse than that. Rural America is shockingly poor. The cost of living’s low because nobody there can afford to pay more, and because they have no local public services to speak of. [edit] the reason, specifically, there aren’t more homeless those places isn’t because it’s better, but because 1) nobody moves in, so 100% of people have family ties of some kind, at least some background that gets them access to a hovel or something, and 2) if you’re actually homeless there, you get picked up and shipped somewhere they can actually serve homeless people (or just go to prison), or you die.