Take Me Home, Country Road....Hey, what is the name of this country road, anyway?

Cool little article from this month's Atlantic, where apparently, the back roads and hollows of rural West Virginia are finally getting street addresses.  Yes, that's right people, if you were a poor, benighted UPS deliveryman working in West Virginia, you have absolutely no way of finding people:

I’d come to McDowell County because, like much of rural America, its streets had long gone unnamed, its roads unmapped. Addresses have historically been an urban commodity; in rural areas, where most people know each other and outsiders are rare, many communities never got around to naming streets and numbering houses.

One of those small, but important things, no?  Imagine if you're a high school junior or senior looking over the horizon for greater opportunity, or even just to go out and see the world, how exactly would all of those fancy college brochures find you?  As an economist, and especially as an urban economist, I am interested in all of these mundane, but structurally important, reasons that poverty proves so intractable.   We can all get into existential debates about whether the poor are lazy or deserving, whether its lack of opportunity or cultures of poverty that are preventing people from moving up, but its stories like this that remind me that barriers to wealth come in more prosaic forms, too.

Good news, though.  Addresses are arriving, and some of these are hilarious:

Other taxonomic efforts have been more ad hoc. Say Vista View and Pine Street are taken, but you come across remnants of a party scattered at the end of a country road. Bingo: Beer Can Alley. By that same logic, one widow—a “pretty hot lady,” according to an amused state employee—suddenly found herself living on Cougar Lane.

$5 says that all the local teenage boys already knew exactly where this street was.