This will not help. You are supposing that the people who feel disenfranchised in the Rust Belt want to move to NYC where they can get cheap housing and work in the city. They don't want the China model of having a Foxconn that hires rural workers to work in the big city.
What these people want isn't fully rational; it's highly emotional. They want their 1950s-style old way of life back. They want their jobs in their towns that they grew up in, that they have lived in or raised families in, where they have their church and their community. They want to live in their IL farm town and work at the local union plant and make a living to pay for pensions and healthcare. It is not realistic in a globalized economy and will be less so in a fully domesticated one, but the math is not what matters here.
Urban areas in these places already have plenty of housing that nobody is in. See Detroit for example.
With this thought process it almost seems like you are saying we have to wait for a generation to die off before this problem is "fixed".
Not saying that you are wrong, but it is a sad idea that we can't fix it. Maybe instead of giving out "gov't handouts" we just give out VR headsets and give pple a Matrix like existance who can no longer bare the thought of their current living conditions. Sad.
I wish I could say it was this easy, but the problem isn't entirely generational. There are millions of young people out in these rural areas too. It's where they grew up, where they went to school, where their families are, where their churches are. If they went to college, they went to a minor in-state college/university and ended up not far from their original birthplace.
What these people are seeking in Trump's "make america great again" is a return to 1950s-1960s America, not as it was, but idyllic as it seems in movies and rosy retrospection.
What I see with the Trump win is that America is simply two Americas: the urban, cosmopolitan melting pot America that most of us here live in, where the wealth inequality problem is gentrification and housing supply is restricted. We are trying to get multitudes of races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds to be able to coexist in the cities. Many of us here are the "elites" even though none of us feel like it, and we take that for granted. That's the whole "white privilege" bit that we hear thrown about by SJWs, and to a large extent they are right in this regard. There is a marked lack of empathy for minorities and "poor" people in SF et al these days. People don't understand it, and it seems that when people go to "understand it" it's some type of socioeconomic tourism where you go hang out in Oakland with locked doors, or if you're in NYC you crawl up to Harlem for a chop cheese, because some rapper talked about it, and you wonder why the bodega has thick acrylic glass in front of the register.
Trump's America is semirural/exurban "American dream" idealism, where people want to "make America great again" by making it great for them in the way it used to be, when America felt white and Christian - that is, not so much talk of gays and minorities and political correctness - you got married, got a nice middle-class job nearby your house, oh, and owned a house and a car and the wife could stay at home. This is what they want; it is what they seem to believe they are promised. It is emotional and has absolutely nothing to do with the status quo; they're hoping by isolating the US from the rest of the world ("like it used to be") they will see this way of life restored.
What they don't understand is that the economics of this is not, and will never be, in their favor.
I feel that it's less about going to a 1950s ideal and more about giving more opportunities to the uneducated rural people who have been extremely hurt by globalism.
Even worse, the only reasons the mid-century was so great in America are 1) we had all the gold (from exporting during WW2), and 2) the productive capacity of most other developed countries was completely destroyed (by WW2). Even if globalization and automation were not issues, there would still be no way of life to go back to.
What these people want isn't fully rational; it's highly emotional. They want their 1950s-style old way of life back. They want their jobs in their towns that they grew up in, that they have lived in or raised families in, where they have their church and their community. They want to live in their IL farm town and work at the local union plant and make a living to pay for pensions and healthcare. It is not realistic in a globalized economy and will be less so in a fully domesticated one, but the math is not what matters here.
Urban areas in these places already have plenty of housing that nobody is in. See Detroit for example.