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This is kind of a local story for me. The background is that the leader of the local “housing authority” made off with the funds to maintain the housing units. HUD took over and realized that there was no way to refurbish the housing units. They are unfit for human habitation—at least by American standards. The local TV station did a report showing what the units looked like and they were beyond disgusting. Some units didn’t even have front doors.

So they were rightly condemned and the occupants have to leave. There is no replacement housing for them in the Cairo area, so who knows where they’ll end up. Cairo is an unbelievably sad place. You can buy a hundred-year-old mansion (it used to be a thriving place) for just 10s of thousands of dollars. No one who has a choice in the matter wants to live there. It’s kind of like the pictures you see of Detroit, except Cairo is much smaller and has no prosperous parts. Most houses and buildings are abandoned. A few liquor stores and mini marts are the only businesses that survive.

Cairo is an example of how bad race relations can destroy a place. Blacks started a boycott of white-owned businesses because the businesses were glad to do business with blacks, but wouldn’t hire them. The boycott worked. The white-owned business went out of business, but nothing and nobody replaced them. Cairo is much like Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Even though the whites did treat them unfairly, the blacks were much better off when Cairo was prosperous. Now, it is all despair.

I’d agree with most of that, and paisa’s comments too, except that I’d go further, based on some familiarity with the area myself: Most of the people trapped in Cairo have little in the way of skills, and IMO never got the guidance or education, much less the “push”, to get any. The city leadership is an oxymoron - I don’t think any of them have had a moment of innovation or entrepreneurial spirit or ideas for at least 2 generations. It is a great example of where welfare states tend to end up, barring overriding (think: Germany) cultural factors.

Further to the north, the decline of the coal industry has hit hard, Carbondale (college town - SIU) is hurting because of IL’s financial woes / cuts at SIU), and though tourism could be more of an attraction, IDNR (Illinois Dept. Of Natural Resources) appears to be clueless on how to run or attract people to what should be profitable attractions such as the “World Shooting and Recreational Complex” (near Sparta, IL) or the nearly 20,000 acre “Pyramid State Park”. (I “found” that Pyramid State Park was so large on Google: Several weeks later my wife and I drove around [exploring] it one Sunday afternoon during a gorgeous Labor Day Weekend with unusually nice [not ghastly hot and humid] weather — and we did not see 10 people the entire afternoon. These places are an hour’s drive from the St. Louis area. The Shawnee National Forest occupies much of deep Southern Illinois too, and is nearly as poorly managed, from the standpoint of economic / tourism development. Sure, there are a couple popular spots like “Garden of the Gods” and “Giant City” Park, but they are mainly frequented by locals. I know no one in the region who has EVER seen any state promotion of these areas on TV, Radio, or Internet to folks in Chicago, much less other regional cities like St. Louis, Nashville, Indianapolis, etc. (This is very nice for locals who like the mostly underutilized campgrounds and such, but disastrous for the region, economically, as a whole.)

This of course does not mean that there is NO entrepreneurial activity in the area: Some of the orchards still do well, some towns are not so bad off (Marion, for example, is doing ok, lead by its redoubtable & crusty old Mayor, Robert L. Butler, since 1963(!), and, there is a spirited (literally) industry of many small vineyards and wineries, some of which are excellent. But, that is not enough to support the region, with disasters like Cairo also in the mix.