I think once the local yokels die off, those places could become cool again, and hopefully they will be repopulated with hip young folks and experience a revival. Currently, the backwardness of some of these places scares off a lot of younger people who are instead congregating in big cities or college towns. But those are becoming stretched and expensive.
I just don't see that happening. For one, these mines are pretty much superfund sites. People aren't flocking to leveled mountains and holes filled with toxic sludge, that is almost certainly poisoning the groundwater (so have fun growing crops and getting good drinking water). And that's if they aren't also being fracked to hell and back.
Unless someone comes along and makes a massively profitable business cleaning up these types of situations, there's just nothing there to gentrify, and these places can't sustain much else.
I don't see anything putting a stop to the move to population centers. Once factory farming starts taking off, it'll further limit what rural areas can sustain.
Same was said about urban centers 20-30 years ago, but now they are hot property with young people flocking to them.
You have to follow the young creative types. They move to a poor area, make it cool and apparently safe, then professionals follow them, make it expensive, then creative types get priced out, and move to another area, and the cycle starts over. It takes time, but the major current centers like Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, are in the process of peaking and pricing out young creative talent. They are going to move somewhere. Probably first wave won't be to Trump country, but once they gentrify and price out Portland, Denver, and other second tier cities, and old geezers in Trump country die off, there may very well be a wave of revival there.
Silicon Valley got its start well before that, and you have it backwards. The professionals were there before the creative types. I'd actually say that's been true of all of those areas. The professionals brought money, which brought creative types (despite the poor starving artist trope, artists actually end up near where the wealth is to try and sell to them). There's been a back and forth some (i.e. the creatives take over some of the delipidated city areas, which then professionals start to gentrify) some, but you need the money there first. Plus, especially these days, where there's a lot of overlap between what was traditionally "creative type" and "professional type". Which I assume your overall point is that they should be trying to woo these younger "startup" types.
Actually with regards to the picture, wasn't the issue just that they were moving from the city proper and out to the fringe areas? So say from Seattle to places like Redmond? The population growth eventually led back to the city (granted it did take active work to improve the city to revitalize the city proper, but its not like they were flocking from the city to middle of nowhere like they'd have to do to revitalize these dying rural areas).
The other thing is, they're behind the times there too. Lots of places have already been doing that. Phoenix, Salt Lake City, North Carolina (not sure specific area), Austin, they've already been courting that stuff and corporations for decades. Basically people will consider smaller cities, but I don't see them going to these really rural areas. Those places are basically selling out for factory work (which makes them beholden to the whims of a company) or dying (sometimes they do the former only for the factory to leave and then they die).
