• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

NY Times article: The Hardest Places to Live in America

myDeaconmyhand

myDeaconmyhand

First man to get a team of horses up Bear Mountain
Joined
Mar 24, 2011
Messages
39,851
Reaction score
9,678
Location
Winston
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-hardest-places-to-live-in-the-us.html?_r=0

"Annie Lowrey writes in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky., which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.

The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)"
...The 10 lowest counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster of six in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt, Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in various parts of the rural South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll Parish, La.; Jefferson County, Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.

...Not a single major urban county ranks in the bottom 20 percent or so on this scale, and when you do get to one — Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit — there are some significant differences. While Wayne County’s unemployment rate (11.7 percent) is almost as high as Clay County’s, and its life expectancy (75.1 years) and obesity rate (41.3 percent) are also similar, almost three times as many residents (20.8 percent) have at least a bachelor’s degree, and median household income ($41,504) is almost twice as high.

...At the other end of the scale, the different variations on our formula consistently yielded the same result. Six of the top 10 counties in the United States are in the suburbs of Washington (especially on the Virginia side of the Potomac River), but the top ranking of all goes to Los Alamos County, N.M., home of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which does much of the scientific work underpinning the U.S. nuclear arsenal..."

I lived in Jackson County KY until I was 10 or so, and I still visit every couple of years to visit my stepdad's family. It's like a whole other world from anywhere i've ever been in North Carolina.
 
Last edited:
winters-bone.jpg
 
uh jennifer lawrence? yeah. me too.
 
It's worth noting that the population in Clay county KY has held steady between 20,000 and 25,000 for the past fifty years. Not a lot of people live there and I would assume that anyone with any sense is leaving as soon as they can. It's just the ones who aren't smart who are seemingly trapped there.
 
Intelligence is only one bootstrap, necessary but not sufficient for people trying to escape places like Clay County, I'd argue.
 
Really? Plenty of dumb people leave places like that too. I suppose it takes some amount of courage, but common sense ought to clue in some folks.
 
Seems more like a poverty measure than anything else. I think measuring median income without also including the cost of living is a bit hollow too. Might not have much impact relative to Clay County, but likely would for places higher up the economic food chain.
 
Last edited:
There are some shit counties to live in Georgia but Jefferson wouldn't have my bottom 10. Interesting.
 
My home county, Hamilton Co., Indiana, ranked as the 12th best. Not surprised that it is high, but that is higher than I'd thought it would be.
 
There are no hard places to live. There are no bad backgrounds. Stop calling them victims, commielibs.
 
For those that watch
Justified-008.jpg


Harlon Co (SE Kentucky, next to Va border)
Ranked 3112 of 3135

...but neighboring counties are worse. They aspire to be Harlan. They take their dates to Harlan...because it's "nice."
 
awaken said:
For those that watch
Justified-008.jpg


Harlon Co (SE Kentucky, next to Va border)
Ranked 3112 of 3135

...but neighboring counties are worse. They aspire to be Harlan. They take their dates to Harlan...because it's "nice."
Click to expand...

you laugh, but most likely this is true. I'd suspect that most of those counties lack shopping malls or movie theaters.

 
I lived in Clay County, KY for three years growing up. There is a little Baptist boarding school, Oneida Baptist Institute, about 15 miles outside of Manchester (the county seat) that was started in 1900 to end a feud that made the Hatfields and McCoys look like they were pals. My mother worked at the school and my brother, sister and I all attended. At the time, it was the No. 1 pot producing county in the nation. To this day, I can remember a hatchback car driving down the road with a fully grown pot plant hanging out the back of it and of the national guard landing their helicopter on our baseball field so the soldiers, with M-16s in hand, could rest while doing pot sweeps.

I can understand why Clay County, and the surrounding area, is considered so hard to live in. There isn't much there. People can feel trapped there. It has nothing to do with intelligence and to think that it does shows your level of intelligence. There has to be the opportunity to leave when you live in a place like that. To say "I would assume that anyone with any sense is leaving as soon as they can. It's just the ones who aren't smart who are seemingly trapped there" totally overlooks the total lack of opportunity that many of these people have. These are poor people, made even poorer by the fact the coal industry is a faltering industry. These people have been trapped in poverty for generations. Its really sad.

Having said that, some of the best people you can ever care to meet can also live there. Without a doubt, the best man I have ever know was from Clay County. He is a man that spent his life caring for and about other people. He graduated from the school I spoke of earlier in 1958 and went on to graduate from college and law school. He turned down the opportunity for a law career in the 1960's and went into the Peace Corps, where he spent six and a half years serving in Iran. The six and a half year tenure is still the longest anyone has served in the Peace Corps. Upon returning, he toured the U.S. as an advocate for the Peace Corps before being called back as the president of the school that gave him his start. The rest of his life was spent helping children that had no other hope, many of whom were on their way to juvenile detention or, in the case of older teenagers, maybe even prison. He was famous in the area for saying "God loved them, Jesus died for them and we have a bed for them." Today, 1000's of kids will tell you how Dr. Barkley Moore and OBI changed their lives. Most importantly, in 1987, when a single mother of three children working three jobs and 100 hours a week was forced to file for bankruptcy and faced having to split up her family due to not being able to support two growing boys and one girl, he offered her a job so the family could stay together. Six years later, when the middle child of that mother, who left his employ in 1990, was wait-listed at Wake Forest, he made it his mission to make sure the University knew they were missing out if they didn't accept the student. He called and argued enough, that I was the first person in the 1993 to be accepted off the wait-list. He is just an example of the 25,000 people you can find in Clay County.

I visited Clay County this past week (my best friend who I have know since eighth grade is now the president of the school we attended), just after the above story came out, after having not been there for a visit in 16 years. Not much had changed. There are still lots of good people there. People that stay in the area to help those less fortunate.



ETA: Sorry for the long post. Just realized how long it had gotten. It just kind of irked me to read someone say the only reason someone would stay there is because they aren't smart enough to get out.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top