US Cities Offering To Pay Student Loans In Exchange For New Citizens

Are you being held down by mounting student loan interest? If you are the city of Niagara Falls, N.Y. might be willing to pay down your student loan debt, all you have to do is live in the city. Niagara Falls and various other cities around the United States are offering students money to pay down their student loans if they agree to move and work in those cities.

Niagara Falls recently hired Seth Piccirillo, the cities new director of community development who is tasked with luring young professionals to the area. For decades Niagara Falls, NY has been losing residents with their youngest citizens heading for other cities.

So what will the New York based city offer? Move to the area and work for two years and they will pay you $3,500 per year for the next two years. City officials have put aside $200,000 for the program.

According to Piccirillo in an interview with Good Morning America:

“We’ve lost a lot of talent, a lot of brain power. For 50 years we’ve been asking ourselves: how do we keep our young people?”

In Niagara Falls the loss of more citizens could send the city into ruins, over the last 50 years the city has went from a population of 100,000 to nearly less than 50,000. If city leaders fail to keep the city’s population above 50,000 at the next census it could lose parts of its federal funding.

Niagara Falls, N.Y. is not the only city offering such a program, in Kansas City fifty counties have established the Rural Opportunity Zones (ROZs) which is given the job of luring in students with student loan repayments up to $15,000. The program in Kansas is open to students who hold associate’s, bachelor’s or post-graduate degrees and who currently have an outstanding student loan balance.

In the meantime city officials hold no illusion that these types of student loans programs will fix their problems, however any help they receive will go a long way.